Examining the Importance of Monitoring Website Traffic
There are over 1.3 billion websites worldwide, and everyone is looking for visitors.
So the competition is fierce, and that’s one of the reasons marketers and businesses invest in SEO, PPC, and social media campaigns to drive website traffic. However, you won’t see any progress or marketing ROI if you don’t track your traffic volume.
Free tools, such as Google Analytics (GA), provide a wealth of information about your website visitors and their actions. This post is about why tracking your traffic is so important.
1. UNDERSTAND YOUR DATA
You can only know your traffic data and analytics through website monitoring. You can obtain a report on your traffic sources, keyword volume, number of pages viewed, and countries with the highest traffic. This data is crucial for decision-making regarding SEO campaigns and customer experience.
Most importantly, you can determine your conversion rate and understand your customers’ journey to optimize essential things. This way, it’s much easier to identify your visitors’ problems that prevent them from taking the actions you want them to take.
Solid marketing today is based on actionable data and consumer preferences. Google Analytics gives you the data you need to analyze your website’s performance and usage, increase traffic, and improve the visitor experience.
2. GET TO KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS
Your website traffic helps you understand what visitors are doing on your website, what they are looking for, and what drove them to convert.
You can improve your services and products when you regularly know what visitors are searching for. You can create purchaser profiles for your potential customers with your customer data. You can define your perfect persona by age, location, salary, and interests.
With GA, you can determine where most of your visitors come from. Location demographics will provide you with a list of countries with more visitors. This way, you know who and where to target to ensure consistent website traffic.
3. DETECT AND FIX ERRORS
Tracking your traffic also helps you identify potential website errors, such as replicate URLs, duplicate tags, web spam, and broken URLs. These are a few issues that affect your traffic and website performance on various browsers and devices.
If you observe a sudden drop in traffic, there is a possible reason. Besides search engine updates, it may be website hosting issues, 404 errors, or slow website speed. Fixing these issues can potentially lead to an increase in web traffic.
Google Analytics also sends notifications to your dashboard when there is an issue with your account setup and website accessibility. These can be redundant hostnames where your website receives data from different hosts. You will also be notified if your conversion rates drop.
4. KNOW THE PERFORMANCE OF YOUR PAGES
With an analytics tool that monitors your site’s traffic, it’s easier to monitor the performance of your pages. You want to find out which pages are ranking well, which can be improved, and which are not ranking at all.
If you know the content that keeps visitors on your site for a long time, you’ll also know what kind of information visitors want. This way, you can create content that quickly engages visitors. Also, you can add internal links to these posts to promote other pages and posts on your site.
Information about pages that perform the worst is also essential to make changes and improvements. They provide insight into how visitors arrive and depart from these pages. You can also identify the possible reasons for the high bounce rates on the worst-performing pages.
One reason may be that the content doesn’t offer what visitors want. It can also be because your web content is technical and complex for most visitors to understand. Conducting a content analysis will assist you in identifying problems and taking the right actions.
5. CHECK YOUR SHOPPING CART ABANDONMENTS
If you run an e-commerce website, you have every reason to track your website traffic, especially if your buying cart abandonment rate is high. With the Goal Funnel in GA, you can set up a goal if you have a multi-step checkout process.
This way, you can determine the points at which your visitors abandon the checkout process. For example, if you notice many visitors abandoning the checkout page, you need to determine why. It may be the total cost of the order, payment options, shipping costs, or an unfriendly design.
When you find out the reason, you can more easily optimize your payment process by eliminating the unpleasant points for your visitors. Review the information you ask for during checkout to see if it triggers purchase anxiety. You also need to eliminate any unnecessary steps.
6. IDENTIFY WHEN YOUR WEBSITE IS BUSIEST
Your content strategy and campaigns need to consider when your website is most visited. With GA, you can break down your traffic by day of the week and time of day to get a more accurate look at traffic during peak hours.
That will help you determine when you should release new content or expand your campaigns to get the most visitors. Knowing this information is key to your marketing success, publishing content that can be shared, and improving your conversation rates.
3 Tools You Should Use to Track Your Website Traffic
You need to know where your visitors are coming from, what they’re interested in, and what their browsing habits are. That way, you can target and effectively adjust your website content, SEO, marketing, and advertising strategies as your business grows.
1. GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Google Analytics is the king of all site monitoring tools – a free web analytics tool offered by Google that assists you in analyzing your website traffic. Evaluating your advertising strategies, optimizing SEO, digital marketing, etc., is essential.
Knowing how many individuals visit your website by age or location, where they come from, and what pages they visit is very helpful in figuring out who your primary target audience is on the internet.
Google Analytics is placed on your website with a tracking code that needs to be entered under the “Website Settings/Third Party Vendors” tab in Showit and an embedded code that needs to be placed in your custom head HTML section.
2. HEATMAP
This feature is good. Heatmap shows you exactly where visitors are clicking and how often. While Google Analytics shows you which pages are visited, Heatmap shows which parts of the page are clicked.
3. GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
Google Search Console shows me what people search for when they type something into Google. It is an excellent tool for search engine optimization – it shows you what people are searching for and how they phrase their search queries. Focusing on these keywords when writing your website copy, naming your images, and writing meta titles and descriptions would be best.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console send monthly updates via email, and Heatmap constantly runs in the background of your site (you can turn the results on and off if you don’t want to see them as often). Use all three applications to track traffic to website, and also recommend them to all clients!
As long as you have a website, tracking and monitoring your traffic is essential to see how visitors engage with your content.
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