If you are going to successfully attract customers online you need to know how to measure your website traffic.
To Measure Website Traffic you Must Know These:
WHERE it is coming from.WHAT they are doing when they get there.WHO you are attracting to your site.WHAT are they most interested in.WHEN are your peak times to get visitors.WHY are they staying or leaving.HOW can you make more profit out of your visitors?
There are several types of traffic tracking you can do. On page traffic, to your page traffic, through your traffic funnel, time on site etc.
WHERE Does Website Traffic Come From?
To measure your incoming traffic you need an analytics tool like Google Analytics. It will show you the “sources” of your traffic. This is broken into categories like organic, paid search, direct traffic, referrals, social media, and other miscellaneous sources.
How to measure website traffic
Organic Search – This is indicated when a person enters a keyword search term into the Search Bar and then selects your listing from the results listed.
If the person has come to your site using a Search Engine, analytics will say “organic” and the result is listed with the name of the referer like Google, Bing, Yahoo, ASK, etc. At one time you could find the keywords listed in the Analytics dashboard as well. Knowing the search terms that bring people to your website is really helpful when building out your blog. Unfortunately there are restrictions on what Google will give you for information now.
If a person is logged in to their Google account while they are doing a search, that search is encrypted meaning you don’t get to use that keyword information. Keyword information is still passed with using the paid AdWords service, which is a prime incentive to use PPC.
Not having access to the organic search terms does make it more difficult to optimize for the search engines but that is a good reason to explore the myriad of paid traffic options. Important to keep in mind though is SEO isn’t a reliable traffic generation tactic.
Paid Search – Paid traffic from the search engines will require you set up additional tracking code so you know you are getting all the useful information.
This way you get the URL of the site, the page of the site, quality score, the ad you are using, the position of the ad, and the CTR (Click Through Rate). All this information is necessary to calculate ROI as well as optimize your advertising campaigns.
Direct Traffic – Presumably this traffic comes when someone has typed in your URL address directly into their browser.
This is common to use for popular sites. The browsers (unless the default settings are changed) will remember the history of website visits and when you start to type in an address the browser will finish it for you.
However, “direct traffic” isn’t always direct. If a referral source doesn’t pass it’s referral info then it can appear to be direct traffic. This can include email links, text message links and so on.
The more a link get socially shared by forwarding and copying and pasting messages, the more “direct traffic” you could end up with.
Referrals – Referral sites are listed by URL and page. In Google Analytics if you select the Referral tab you can then click on the link with will take you directly to the page that referred you.
Whats great about this too is you can drop a comment thanking them for the link 🙂
If it comes from Facebook or Twitter it might be a little more difficult to find the thread but its still worth the try.
WHAT Are Visitors Doing While They Are On Your Site?
Being able to watch your visitors in real time and record their activities can give you great insight to what is appealing to your targeted audience. You need to do this for analyzing on-page usability as well as conversion optimization.
You want to know that your visitors are finding it easy to manage your site and are finding what they came for as well as finding what you want them to see.
Using tools tracking website traffic that generate heat maps you will see what is interesting to your visitors and what they are skipping over. Using link tracking tools will tell you what they are clicking on.
WHO Are The Visitors You Are Attracting To Your Site.
To be able to effectively market to your audience you need to know who they are. Age, country, gender, etc. Using this information you can really hone your avatar image for direct targeting advertising and articles.
You may find out when you investigate your visitors demographics that you have been attracting a different crowd than originally anticipated.
Personal information is recorded when people are logged into their Google accounts or Bing or Facebook and the like. When you sign up for these programs your demographic data is passed with your movements around the web. The information is compiled and made available as “non-identifying” data.
WHAT Are Your Visitors Most Interested In?
By using the tracking data you can learn where users are spending most of their time. Track website traffic data to split test pages, optin forms, colours, headlines, and offers. Use this information to alter your offers or maybe add more of the same when you see high conversion.
At the other end you may find you have a high bounce rate on your site. This means that people are coming to your site but not staying to look around. They are acting like they just
If there is little to no interest you need to be aware of this to reach your business goals.
WHEN Are Your Peak Traffic Times
What time of day are you currently getting the most traffic?
You need to measure this from all traffic. Organically and paid traffic.
Organic times can be combined with your demographic tools because the time of day people visit will often be related to the location of your visitor. If your peak times are when the East Coast is getting off work then you might want to come up with an offer that is specific to this demographic.
Measure your highest ROI times for your various paid advertising. Knowing this information can help you to weed out the money sucking ads and put more focus on higher trafficked and higher converting ads.
Another important aspect of this is; if you learn that your highest traffic is during commute times, you can also cross reference this with the browsers they are using. If it looks like you have a lot of mobile traffic at certain times then you want to make sure you are catering to that crowd with mobile optimized pages and offers.
WHY Are People Leaving?
When your visitors show up to your site are they staying for awhile? Are they scrolling or clicking to other pages?
Using visitor engagement tracking will tell you why they are staying and why they are leaving.
This measurement can get a little complicated because there are different variables. Each ad will attract a person for a reason. Each page will be interesting and relevant for its individual content, and links coming from organic listings and social shares will also attract people. Each of these sources and landing pages are variables that need to be measured to deduce accuracy.
For example
– Your overall bounce rate may be 60% and an average visitor time of 2.5 minutes.
– You also have a few pages where the bounce rate is below 30% and visitors stay for 10 minutes or more.
– Other pages people are landing on and are staying for only a few seconds, if at all.
Using your collected information you can decide why they are staying and why they are leaving. Make changes and test again to improve the overall performance of all pages.
HOW Can You Turn Your Website Visitors Into Profits
That’s the bottom line. How to attract leads and turn them into customers using your website. Whether you are a brick and mortar business or strictly digital products and services, you have a business to run that needs to make sales.
Using all the methods listed you will be better prepared to put together offers that will be more attractive to your customer.
Passive ways of generating income from your business website include affiliate offers, selling ad space, and more.
Positive Results Measuring Website Traffic
As you can see by measuring EVERYTHING about your website traffic, and visitors behaviours, you will be able to work your website into higher performance for you and your bottom line.
Test, track, and test again.
