Tracking your website traffic and web visitors is essential. In doing this, you can understand if you are reaching the audience that you set out to reach and who your website is appealing to. It also allows you to view where your traffic is coming from, whether this be Google, social media or another source.
The advantages of properly following and understanding your traffic are huge and can be a vital cog in helping your business form its ongoing digital strategy.
But which are the key information metrics to follow? And where do we find them? Read on to find out.
Where Did They Come From?
One of the key points to understanding your website traffic is to know where your visitors are coming from. This could be Google, various social media platforms, or perhaps a backlink from another website. By figuring this out, and knowing what is working for your business, you can form future plans on how to increase these numbers.
There is a whole host of software platforms that can help with this, although we find that a combination of Google Analytics and Semrush is a particularly useful approach. While Google Analytics is free, Semrush is not, and the benefit of working with a digital agency is that they have paid for software that as a business, you may not wish to purchase.
Google Analytics has an acquisition section, that shows exactly where your traffic has come from, and it breaks it down into easy-to-understand percentages. It splits between organic search, paid search, social media, direct and referral. Semrush tracks third party data, which is why a combination of the two works well.
Another great way we use to track website visitors is contact forms or checking out forms. Adding a field and asking the user who is filling it in where they discovered your business, or its website, is a first-hand way to gather data.
Likewise, WooCommerce – our preferred platform for e-commerce sites – also tracks where users have come from.
Who Are They?
Its one thing knowing where your visitors came from, but if you don’t know a bit about them then how do you know if you are attracting the right audience?
Knowing the demographics is key!
Once again, Google Analytics plays a crucial role. Among the demographic information that Google Analytics is able to supply is location (country and city), age, gender and interests.
With all this information combined, you are able to understand a lot about your business’s website traffic and whether you are attracting the right users who will, at some point, require your services or products.
Why Is This Important?
With the data and material discussed; your digital marketing specialists can now use this information to improve your websites performance in various ways.
• Understanding your audience – You can now structure content, offers and more, to appeal to a specific audience
• Improve SEO – Tailor your keywords and phrases to your audience
• Social media spend – By knowing which platforms are generating the most traffic, your business can look at spending more in paid/sponsored posts to further increase this number
• Website improvements – If a certain page or section of your site isn’t performing as you like with the audience that you want, then this is a good indicator that new content needs to be created
• Improved user experience – Tailoring content, whether on social or your website, to your audience is only going to improve user experience and result in more clicks to, or more time spent on, your website by the right kind of users
The whole process is basically about gathering the right data, analysing what it means and using the results to improve and increase the quality and quantity of your web visitors.
Maximize Your Understanding
Now, to get the best metrics and understanding, we always recommend working with a digital partner such as WADEDIGITAL, as we have spent years learning how to best read and use the information that we gather.
It is so important to make sure the data you gather is correct and well understood, otherwise you risk creating a business strategy that doesn’t hit the mark.
We are here to help analyse your user data, or to improve traffic to your website – be it through SEO work or Google Ads.
