How to check and analyze website traffic: Comprehensive guide

Why do you need to analyze website traffic?

In order to successfully promote your site in search engines and monetize your website traffic, you should regularly analyze and check a website’s traffic. This will help you find:

• Resources and search engines that bring readers to your site.
• User demographics—gender, age, geography, and the like
• Traffic varies by day of the week, holiday or business day
• Most readable pages
• Whether the applied promotional tools are useful
• What should you do to improve behavioral factors and increase overall traffic?

As a result, you will be able to monitor the effectiveness of online marketing, cut out what doesn’t work, and allocate the budget correctly.

Which metrics should you check?

Remember that you need to analyze traffic at least once a week to get high results. Let’s see which websites you should pay attention to traffic statistics.

Sessions (visits) it is the simplest measurement you check first. A visit is any interaction by the user with your site for a specified period of time. A session is a set of interactions with a site over a period of time.

Average visit time. This indicator shows the average time a user spends on your website. It is the arithmetic average between the visit times of all users. The higher this ratio, the better the search results.

Bounce Rate. Shows the percentage of users who go to only one page of the resource and leave within 15 seconds.

channel specifies the type of traffic source, such as organic search, contextual advertising (CPC), or website referral.

clicks. This metric shows how users interact with various elements on your site’s pages.

convert shows the percentage of visitors who completed the targeted action on the site: purchase, search, fill out the lead form, etc.

TO Shows the percentage of users who visited your site after seeing one of your pages in search results. For example, if 10 different users saw your page in search results, but only one clicked and went to the site, your CTR would be 10%.

hit. Includes hits, views, and events. A view is a user download of a page on the site. Web analytics systems automatically log views. An event is a user’s action (for example, watching a video or clicking a button) that does not load a new page but is recorded by the web analytics system.

Landing/exit pages. The landing page is the first page that the user sees when logging in from various sources and channels. The exit page is a page where the user has ended their visit.

Returning Visitor is a user who has previously set cookies while visiting the site.

sales funnel. It reflects the entire business cycle, from touching to completed transactions. The essence of creating a funnel is to make an inverted pyramid where untreated leads (leads that react to action or communication) will be at the top and sales or repeat sales will be at the bottom.

Traffic sources includes resources that direct the user to your site: a search engine (Google, Yahoo), a social network (Facebook, Pinterest) or another site.

Unique visitor is a user who visits your website at least once during the reporting period. Each such user is counted only once.

These are the main parameters of web traffic statistics. How can you control your website traffic using these metrics? You can do this with special tools, which we will tell you below.

Vehicles

Use one of the website traffic analysis tools to get statistics on your web traffic.

Many webmasters use the Google Analytics service for this purpose. Thanks to GA, you have the opportunity to control traffic and track viewed pages, completed conversions and events, as well as conduct a cohort analysis of the target audience, run a split test and sort visitors by interests. The tool is free.

Google Analytics only lets you find statistics on your site. You can use other services to analyze competitors’ website traffic.

Similar Web. The service allows you to get information about any site and compare resources. Data provided by the service:

• Website traffic statistics and user interaction in general
• Traffic sources
• Detailed breakdown of data for each traffic source
• audience interests
• Organic search and keywords in context
• Popular pages
• competitor sites
• Analysis of industry and popular sites
• Application analytics

Cost: Free basic reports, paid version – starting at $199 per month.

Serpstat is another website traffic analyzer. It provides advanced analysis of search queries and visits to your competitor’s site pages, allowing webmasters to analyze keywords, paid results, and positions. There is a free basic version. The paid one starts at $69 per month.

SEMrush allows you to analyze competitive sites, traffic sources and keywords that competitors promote to Google. It offers analytical reports on various parameters:

• Keywords for which the site is ranked in the search results,
• Distribution of positions in top search results
• Page optimization for mobile devices
• Main competitors (search, context)
• Links
• Video ads
• ATL advertising etc.

Cost: There is a 7-day free version, then you’ll pay starting at $99 per month.

Alexa collects statistics through browser plug-ins that users install themselves. Displays website data with traffic of more than 100,000 visits per month.

Data provided by the service: Analysis of search traffic, links, site loading speed, keywords for search and context, comparison of several sites. It has a 14-day trial period, after which it’s $149 per month.

Google Analytics: A step-by-step guide

We have shared an analysis example below to clarify how to control website traffic with Google Analytics. You will learn how to connect Google Analytics to your site and control its most important parameters.

website audience

First, you need to take a few simple steps:

1. Register with Google or register Google Analytics in your Google account if you already have it.
2. Sign up for Analytics using your Google account username and password.
3. Enter information about your site: account name, site name, URL, industry, and reporting time zone. Pay attention to the protocol (http / https) and choose the one your site works on. Enter the actual time zone, otherwise you will not be able to collect accurate visit time data.
4. Next, you should install the Google Analytics counter directly on your website. Click “Get Tracking ID” and Paste it into the site code on all pages before the closing tag. If the site already has a counter but you’re not sure it’s linked to your account, you can check by looking at the site code and finding the Google Analytics ID.
5. The Analytics counter starts collecting data and you can start working. Gradually, the Google Analytics counter will process the data from the site and the page will fill up.

Below we will share an analysis example from our website.

Visit and session statistics, bounce rate

Here we can not only see static numbers, but also see them dynamically and compare, for example, how the number of visitors has changed in the last 28 days.

geolocation

The report on this parameter is presented in both tabular and map form for better visual perception.

Age and gender of visitors

Everything is simple here. You can see whether your visitors are predominantly male or female and what age they are.

Device deployment

This report allows you to see on which devices visitors check your site and their behavior depending on the device. Our blog is mostly visited from desktop computers, but the number of visits from tablets has increased in the last seven days.

Time reporting

Here you can clearly see the distribution of visits to the site by days and hours of the day. It becomes most popular on Fridays and Saturdays, and on any given day, visitors come more often in the afternoon.

Of course, you should analyze all the data together and find out whether it is an advertising company, how the indicators have changed after some developments on the site, etc.

channels

Of course the main reason to start the Google counter for the site is that it can receive data about traffic and user interest to the site. You can fund such data in reports. The simplest report channels that do not require additional settings such as connecting targets.

Go to: Traffic Sources → All Traffic → Channels

Traffic sources can be:

• organic search shows organic search engine results (the most important indicator for SEO)
• directly is direct traffic (users enter the site address in the address bar)
• Reference shows referrals from other sites
• Affiliates traffic from partner sites
• Social shows transitions from social network
• view means traffic from display or banner ads
• Paid Search traffic from paid ads
• Email includes transitions from email newsletters
• Other Advertisement Other UTM-tagged traffic

We have now selected only the most important indicators for us. They are reflected in the report. Overall, it’s clear that organic search dominates, followed by referral transitions.

The developers of Google Analytics understand how difficult it is to set up and set up a Google counter on a site, and therefore they have developed many services to help:

• Analytical Help
• The test account is available to everyone (it is impossible to create a Google counter, but you can click on reports and settings)
• Analytics Academy with free online courses

How can you analyze your website traffic efficiently?

Website analysis allows you to abandon ineffective promotional methods, find new traffic sources, increase your position in the SERP and ultimately increase revenue. How you control your website traffic using simple and affordable Google Analytics tools or other services is up to you. The main thing is to do this constantly and make the right decisions for further progress based on analysis.