The performance of your website is an essential component to the success of your products or services. Measuring that performance requires the consistent tracking of a wide range of variables and metrics.
Measuring website traffic is one measure that provides invaluable data and insight into the needs and behaviors of your users.
It uncovers opportunities that you can take to optimize your website and increase the results you achieve through all of your marketing efforts.
Why Measure Website Traffic?
Measuring your website’s traffic allows you to observe various key performance indicators. It also serves as an effective measure of your marketing campaigns.
By tracking the number of users who visit your site’s pages, you can gauge the results of your social media marketing, paid advertising, and SEO efforts among others.
Using this data, you can modify your marketing strategies, increase their efficiency, and increase your return on investment.
By measuring your individual pages, you can determine the needs of your users and prioritize your content more effectively.
Finally, measuring your website traffic lets you measure the performance of each content type. Blog posts, tutorials, podcasts, and other types of content will appeal to different users.
Knowing which type of content provides the greatest response will help you tailor your content marketing over time.
What You Need to Measure
The following are the most important metrics in measuring your website’s traffic:
- Unique visitors
- Traffic sources
- Bounce rates
- Keywords
- Page views
- Entry and exit pages
Unique Visitors
Unique visitors are those distinct users who land on your site’s pages. This metric does not measure the number of visits for each individual user. It only measures the number of new visitors.
The number of unique visitors may be improved through the use of pay-per-click (PPC) and other advertising. Targeting different keywords helps you achieve a higher number of unique visitors to your site.
Traffic Sources
Your traffic sources are critical to improving your site’s performance. By identifying the search engines and websites that provide traffic, you can align yourself with those sources that can serve as valuable partners.
Websites or search engines may provide a small amount of traffic. If so, you can determine how to optimize your efforts to increase traffic from those sources.
Bounce Rate
Your site’s bounce rate indicates the number of users who leave your site after visiting a single page.
This can be a result of your site’s failure to provide the content they need. Site performance issues and poor keyword targeting can also increase your bounce rates.
Keywords
By tracking the keywords used by your audience when searching online, you can determine which keywords provide the best return on your investment. This information can be used to improve your PPC campaigns and tailor your content more effectively.
Page Views
In contrast to the unique visitors, the page views metric indicates how many times a page has been visited, regardless of who the user might be.
You can use this information to better direct your site’s traffic to those pages that perform better than others. You can add calls-to-action on pages that have high page views to improve conversion rates.
Entry and Exit Pages
The pages through which people enter and exit your site are also important to measure. Your home page isn’t always the first point of contact for your visitors. Pages that rank highly or have strong inbound link profiles will have a higher rate of entry.
The pages from which users leave your site provide insight into elements that may be driving traffic away. Tracking these metrics will help you decrease bounce rates and improve engagement with your site’s visitors.
Knowing the benefits that your business can achieve through the measurement of traffic as well as the metrics to include in your analytics reports gives you a comprehensive view of your site’s performance.
If you aren’t sure where to begin measuring your website traffic, let us know in the comments section below. We can provide the information that’s specific to your business needs so that you can successfully optimize your website traffic.
