Your website is the cornerstone of your digital marketing presence. It is your virtual storefront. Managing your business site is critical to having a strong digital presence and monitoring your website traffic is a key aspect of your website performance.
The amount of traffic directly correlates with how many people will click, sign up, or make a purchase from your business. It is very important to have a constant flow of traffic because customers are the heart of your business, and traffic is your website’s bloodline.
- More helpful reading: https://www.fannit.com/blog/what-is-digital-marketing/
What is Website Traffic and Why Does It Matter?
To put it simply, website traffic is the number of users who have accessed a web page, these are sometimes referred to as “sessions”.
The number of sessions that a website is attracting has been a longstanding way of determining the popularity of a website and its products or services.
Our ability to analyze website metrics has thankfully become much more detailed over the years.
When we use the right tools to track a website’s metrics we can see how long users stay on a certain page, what products or links they click on, and in which order.
We are able to see bounce rate (how quickly someone leaves a site), are able to track Conversions, percentage of visits that turn into a sale, and assess the conversion rates.
All of this information leads to you being able to better optimize your website to generate more traffic and more sales.
You may know how to view your site’s traffic, but there are many other key factors that you should look for as well. Taking your knowledge of website traffic to a deeper level will allow you to attract the right audience and generate better results for you or your clients.
For now, let’s dive into the benefits of monitoring.
Later on, we will work on improving your website’s traffic, as well as how to find data on your competitor’s website traffic.
The Benefits of Monitoring Website Traffic
It is well known that you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
Monitoring your website will help determine where you are right now and how to move forward.
Whether you need more email signups, to generate more sales, or increase your return on investment for your advertising, your website traffic stats will show you where to improve.
Web traffic analysis is important for a few other reasons as well.
Tracking your web traffic metrics will help you understand the data better.
You’ll be able to see what keyword volume, the pages with the highest number of views, and what countries or areas your visitors are from.
Understanding this data will help you refine your focus.
Here are 5 main benefits to understanding website traffic
- Increase customer acquisition and retention
- Develop the right customer engagement strategy
- Know your audience
- Improve your marketing campaigns
- Monitor and prevent abandoned carts
Monitoring your website’s traffic analytics will also help you see what pages are performing the best.
This goes hand-in-hand with your ideal buyer profile.
- More helpful reading: https://www.fannit.com/blog/digital-marketing-strategy/
Once you see what content is ranking highest, what needs improvement, and what isn’t getting any traffic at all.
From here you’ll be able to take a deeper look and see what errors need to be fixed–whether it’s more curated content, optimized SEO strategies, or faster page speeds.
Let’s understand how each one of these benefits works!
Increase Customer Acquisition and Retention
Companies who monitor their websites typically can increase their customer acquisition and retention.
Minimizing your site’s bounce rate is important because the longer you can keep your visitors engaged, the more likely they are to make a purchase.
Knowing your customers will help you target them more effectively. Half of the battle is getting visitors to your site and the second half of the battle is to keep them on your page.
Having data on your customers allows you to enhance your marketing campaigns and will help increase referral traffic to your site as well.
Other websites will refer to your site if you have relevant content on your page.
You can use a web traffic checker such as Google Analytics or SimilarWeb to see data on referral sources.
Develop the Right Customer Engagement Strategy
Having the right customer engagement strategy is a great way to develop a strong relationship with your customers.
Monitoring the traffic to your page will help you understand ways to engage with your customers more effectively.
One example of a strategy you could implement is to provide your customers with a pop up on the screen after a certain duration of time that they have spent on your page.
The pop up could be a promotional offer that may increase their level of engagement. Additionally, you can have a guest posting page where customers can ask questions and post reviews.
You can monitor how much time people spend viewing the reviews section and see which reviews rank highest in popularity and include that content at the top of the section.
Identifying user feedback will provide you valuable insight into what your customers want.
Implementing that feedback in your changes signals to your audience that you are listening!
We highly recommend that you make an effort to engage with your customers over social media.
Social media is a great way to make a customer feel important, learn about their feedback and encourage them to feel valued.
If you message them directly or comment back on one of their posts they’ll be better encouraged to engage with your brand.
Know Your Audience
As you begin to analyze your website you will quickly start to gain very valuable information about your visitors.
Data regarding how long users spend on sites is very important because it shows which pages were catching your user’s attention.
This data will help you market your company online in a way that will hopefully increase the duration of your user visits.
By identifying which page visitors spend time on and which sources and platforms that they used you can create campaigns to drive similar users to those pages, and provide better, more refined engagements over time.
Knowing your audience will ultimately help you increase your traffic and drive more meaningful page sessions.
Information about your visitor’s demographics will guide you on how to target them best.
Meaning you might write a blog post or article that will appeal to a specific demographic which will help decrease your bounce rate for that specific group of people.
If you know your audience, you can create better content that will boost your ranking in search engines.
Improve Your Marketing Campaigns
Monitoring traffic stats will provide you with valuable information that will help improve your marketing campaigns.
Let’s say that you are running an ad campaign on a social media platform, through analyzing web traffic data you can see which social media platforms brought in the most traffic.
A social network is a great way to reach a lot of customers quickly and effectively.
Analyzing these metrics can help you identify areas where you can optimize your ad spend, and what traffic sources you should spend the bulk of your time generating traffic from.
For example, Instagram may have been much more successful for one specific piece of content in comparison to the same bit of content on Facebook.
This shows you that you should focus more on Instagram for similar campaigns in the future.
Social media is a very valuable tool to utilize for your marketing campaigns and gaining website traffic statistics on how a specific article or piece of content is influencing search results can help you maximize your marketing efforts.
- More helpful reading: https://www.fannit.com/digital-marketing-services/
Monitor And Prevent Shopping Cart Abandonment
Conversions are everything when it comes to staying in business.
When it comes to managing performance across campaigns, conversions are what you look at to assess whether or not campaigns are meeting your goals.
You can have a ton of traffic to your website, but you need to make sales.
By monitoring your website’s traffic and actions, you can see when a customer visits your site and adds an item to their shopping cart.
More often than you would think, customers add items to their cart and do not end up completing the purchase.
Currently, cart abandonment is one of the highest drop-off points within a website’s conversion funnel.
The average abandoned cart rate is at close to 70%!
By assessing your sources of data You are setting yourself up to make better informed decisions on how you can improve this traffic funnel.
In your data panel, you can see how often this is happening and find ways to get more customers to finish the check out process.
One way to target these customers is to use email marketing if they are signed up for it.
For example, Amazon will send you content about an item that is in your cart and ask if you would like to purchase it.
Through the process of tracking user activity on your site will enable you to connect that user with email marketing.
User tracking and email marketing will enable you to also offer highly personalized deals that cater to people that have an item in their cart to help encourage them to make a purchase after they left it.
Website Tracking: Anybody Want a Cookie?
When an individual visits a website, the device they use communicates with the website’s server.
If you’ve ever seen a request to accept your cookie settings, you can confirm that your website movements are being tracked. (But not in the spooky FBI agent kind of way.)
Every page on the internet is made up of many separate files.
The server will transmit the cookie to the user’s browser where they are assembled and formed into a cumulative piece with graphics and text.
Each file that is sent represents a single “hit”, which means that a single page view can result in multiple hits.
The traffic of a website’s homepage is not the only thing that is monitored.
Each segment of the website is constantly being monitored by the server to determine the number of hits that each segment receives.
Each visit is known as a “session” and each session has a beginning and an endpoint.
The exact amount of time varies for each session depending on how long the user spends looking at a certain webpage.
Cookies are like receipts that track user information as users engage with a website.
This metric is not always accurate because Google Analytics can only track returning user cookies if they’re coming from the same browser and from the same device.
Cookies can seem like a nuisance to your page browsing experience, but when it comes to website analysis the cookie enables us to track a user’s website experience.
This provides us valuable insight into how we can make improvements.
Analyzing Your Website’s Traffic
The most valuable tool that you can use to analyze your website traffic is Google Analytics.
You can directly connect Google Analytics to your site which will provide you data about your site’s visitors.
It will explain where your customers are coming from, how they are interacting with your website, and how many people are visiting. Search engines such as Google offer very powerful tools for analytics.
What Data is Most Important to Pay Attention To?
If you want to check the traffic of your website, we recommend that you install Google Analytics.
This will provide you with the exact amount of traffic that you are receiving and where those visitors are coming from.
Moreover, this will make the job of finding out what to do next on your site much easier.
Valuable Statistics to Consider
Let’s take a look at some of the most important statistics you should keep in mind.
Organic Search Traffic
The number of people who visited your site through a search in Google or another search engine.
- More Helpful Reading: https://www.fannit.com/seo/seo-best-practices/
Organic search traffic will be improved through SEO actions.
Things like improving UI/UX, improving page speed, and optimizing your content for readability and crawl ability will help improve your organic search traffic.
Unique Visitors
Select a specific date range and see people who visited your site at least once.
Driving unique visitors is critical. Yes you may have a great audience now.
But if you’re selling products that are long lasting, you will need to create unique page visits.
Pageviews
Pageviews measure how many pages were loaded and scrolled through within your website.
Pageview monitors patterns in user behavior, and can be beneficial when creating a better user experience.
By analyzing pageviews you can identify the patterns, reduce site friction, and eliminate distractions from conversions.
Bounce Rate
Google defines bounce rate as a single page session on your website.
In other words a “bounce” is when your visitors return to their original search page after only looking at one of your website pages. It’s hard to nail down an average or even what’s “good” or “bad” for bounce rates.
Every industry and website has different goals and is offering a variety of content.
The “average” bounce rate is anywhere between 25%-70% which leads to a wide gap to wonder what’s too high and what’s just right.
Most experts agree that if your bounce rate is higher than 70% then it’s time to be concerned and look for errors that need to be corrected.
On the other side if your bounce rate is less than 25% this could also indicate that something on your page is broken.
If you’re sitting right around 30%-50% your website should be in good shape!
There are many factors that affect bounce rate, and not all of them are bad! If the content on one page is self-sufficient, meaning that the user gets all the information they’re looking for on one page, that increases bounce rate.
One of the most talked about reasons is, of course, slow page speed.
This is huge because it also affects your ability to rank higher on Google searches.
You’ll want to pay extra special attention to this. When your page speeds are slow visitors are likely to leave much more quickly and less likely to view other content on your website.
Another reason users leave quickly has to do with titles and meta descriptions.
If your titles and descriptions are misleading and aren’t directly connected to the content on the page it will be detrimental to your site.
Users will exit quickly in hopes of finding another website with information related to their search.
Make sure that you are accurately describing the contents of your writing with good titles and meta descriptions.
This helps you rank higher for relevant searches and allows users to find information that gives them value and hopefully leaves a good impression about your brand.
A few other reasons you might have a high bounce rate include:
- Blank pages or technical errors
- A bad link from another site (unqualified leads)
- Landing pages that are only meant to collect data and don’t lead the viewer onward.
- Under-optimized or low quality content.
- A bad UX design
- A page not being mobile-optimized
Conversion Rate
A conversion rate is the number of users who take the desired action on a website.
Of course when we think of this our minds might go straight to sales, but conversion also refers to many other things.
Sometimes our goal is simply to have customers enter their emails into a sign up list, a subscription sign up, requesting more information about a service, downloading a guide or trial of something, spending a certain amount of time on one page, or returning consistently to the same content.
All of these actions are a part of the conversion rate metric because they influence the results we get after analyzing our numbers.
Conversion rate is not the same thing as conversion count which is the actual number of people who are completing the desired action.
In most cases your conversion rate is more important than the count.
Tracking your conversion rate will give you key insights into what aspects of your strategy are working well. For instance you might see your conversions shoot up after running a great ad campaign, meaning that your overall web design is doing well.
However, if your ads are performing well and you aren’t seeing any upward changes in conversion numbers or they start to dip then this could indicate a need for some design and UX changes.
- More helpful reading: https://www.fannit.com/seo/expert/
A “good” conversion rate is a pretty relative number based on many website factors.
The simple answer would be that a good conversion rate is just higher than your average before.
Because industry standards differ according to product and service along with brand awareness, and price.
To accurately track and assess your website’s metrics you should be analyzing your conversion rate on a monthly basis.
This will give you the best overview of how your site is doing as opposed to obsessing over it on a daily or weekly basis.
Time on site
Along with the many other site metrics you should consider, time on page is an important one to remember.
It is similar to bounce rate, however taking a deeper look at exactly how long each user is staying on specific pages can offer you some valuable insights.
While the bounce rate tells you how many people leave your website after only viewing one page, the time on page tells you if they’re actually receiving relevant information.
If you notice that users are leaving almost immediately after clicking onto your page this will tell you that you aren’t driving the right kind of traffic to your website.
This means you’ll need to reassess your ad targeting as well as your content and SEO strategy.
When you see that users are sticking around to read through your page this is a good sign, meaning that they’ve found helpful information and that your targeting is on point.
New Versus Returning Visitors
Another element to keep in mind is the understanding of how many visitors are new, or unique and how many visitors are returning.
The difference between New users versus returning users is very straightforward.
New users have never been to your website before, a new user is tracked as someone who has a unique session from a browser and device combination that has not been registered by google’s cookies yet.
Returning users are different. Returning users are individuals who have jumped on a particular website for a session before.
In order to be registered as a returning user.
This information is gathered by the cookies google applies to the website.
Being able to assess new visitors versus returning visitors, will enable you to get an understanding of what kind of loyal traffic visitors you have, and how much your campaigns are driving new, unique traffic to your website.
Other Traffic Channels:
The number of visitors to your site through channels such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook as well as referral traffic.
Referral traffic is visitors who click on a link to your site from other websites.
Tips for Monitoring Website Traffic
Here are some tips to help you monitor the website traffic you generate.
Prevent Data Loss
If you do not monitor the traffic that your page is receiving, you are essentially just in the dark.
t is very hard to determine where to allocate your marketing budget online if you do not have information about your customers. Website traffic checker tools such as Google Analytics do all of the tracking work for you once you set it up.
It will store all of that content in a safe place where you can easily access the information.
Data has so much power in marketing and you cannot risk losing it. It is a good idea to ensure safe practices by using analytic tools that will help monitor traffic statistics.
These statistics help identify multiple things such as which items and pages are most popular, which pages people visit most, how long customers stay on your site, and your conversion rate.
There are many different pieces of information that you can track through Google Analytics, but these are the main ones to look for when analyzing your website’s traffic.
Knowing where your primary traffic comes from will also help you view your metrics from a better perspective.
If most of your traffic is coming from mobile, but you see that your mobile traffic is low compared to the industry specific standard you’ll know where to focus your improvement efforts.
Google Analytics is a tool that you can use to see where your web traffic is coming from, including which type of devices they use.
Google Analytics will give you insight on how to improve your website to target your desired audience more efficiently.
Monitoring your website’s traffic analytics has many benefits in helping you optimize your website so that both desktop and mobile visitors have an easy experience.
Continue to stay up-to-date on user trends and new methods for improving your website to have consistent conversions!
Traffic Sources
There are three sources where your traffic can come from.
- Search Traffic
- Direct Traffic
- Referral Traffic
Each one of these sources of traffic can be used to capture an audience, create connections, and drive sales through your website.
It is important that you understand where your traffic is coming from, so you can learn how to drive more traffic to your site through strategic digital marketing campaigns.
Search
Search traffic is the bread and butter here at Fannit.
Search traffic occurs when a user is referred to your site by a search engine, you can work to build greater search traffic volume by optimizing your web pages for the search engine crawlers, a practice commonly known as search engine optimization, (or SEO).
Search traffic is valuable because users have entered a search for either your brand, or a topic, product or service that is highly relevant to your brand.
Plus, search traffic can be an extremely valuable source to generating more traffic, or win more users.
- More helpful reading: https://www.fannit.com/seo/technical-seo/
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic can be defined as website traffic that does not come from any other domain or source.
What this means simply, is that a user has typed in your URL directly!
Typically direct traffic is created by a few culprits.
Each type of direct traffic varies in value to your tracking and monitoring insights.
- Customers – These are people who may have made a purchase and visit your URL to sign in, track a purchase, or browse for additional info. You may want to set up Google Analytics to view without this traffic.
- Internal employees – We recommend you filter this direct traffic out within your Google Analytics. The IP address of internal employees should be filtered.
- Actual Direct – These are your fans. They may have bookmarked a page, and are clicking to come back to your page or revisit a product.
Additional forms of direct traffic are a little less straightforward.
You’ll want to be mindful of these forms of direct traffic because, well, they’re not actually direct, they just aren’t registered by any additional source.
- Email Traffic
- Mobile Traffic & Apps
- Secure to non secure websites
Google has yet to find a way to create a more specific attribution for these types of direct traffic.
We’re sure this will change as tracking abilities become more advanced.
For now, let’s move on to referral traffic.
Referral Traffic
Just like you might refer a friend to your new favorite restaurant or a chiropractor who helped you make big improvements, traffic to your website can also come from referrals.
Referral traffic can come from your own social media platforms and paid ads, or when another resource
provides a link to your business. Google defines this as any traffic that comes from outside of its search engine results.
Google Analytics tracks three types of traffic, the other two are:
- Search traffic: when a user clicks on a page because it’s a result for something else they “googled”.
- Direct traffic: when a user types in a direct link to a website.
Google Analytics makes it easy to track and differentiate between all three types of traffic.
This makes it easy to gain a good understanding of what avenues are bringing in the most traffic to your website! This can help you refine your campaigns and spend money where it’s most effective.
Here are a few ways to increase your referral traffic:
- Post your website to online directories that are relevant to your industry.
- Get your website published on review directories.
- Leverage your social media.
- Comment on other blogs that are relevant to your own content.
- Lean toward visual ad campaigns with minimal copy.
While referral traffic can be awesome when it produces qualified leads, you want to keep an eye out for referral spam.
This happens when bots are giving your website lots of hits.
It may not seem like there’s much harm in it, but having these hits that don’t add any value to your stats can take a big toll in the long run. These spam referrals will drive up your referral traffic statistics but won’t accurately reflect the number of real users coming to your website.
This will also skew your bounce rate and average spend time, which we know affects your google ranking! So having these spam referrals can absolutely negatively affect your website ranking and conversion rate!
There is something that can be done about this, however.
Google Analytics allows you to filter your referral traffic with some pretty simple steps. It’s easy to find a tutorial for this along with an updated version of the latest string of code to implement.
Since the bots are ever changing make sure you stay up-to-date so that you can adjust your settings to include the new ones.
Referral traffic is a great way to consistently drive visitors to your website.
Make sure you set up your Google Analytics in a way that allows you to have clean reporting so you can clearly tell where your traffic is coming from and boost those channels!
Mobile Versus Desktop
Although it may seem like an irrelevant detail, it is highly important to pay attention to which devices people are using to visit your site.
Over the past decade, mobile traffic has spiked with the popularity of smartphones and tablets.
The number of people making searches online through mobile devices is also continuing to trend upward.
Research shows there is a difference between the types of content that are searched for on desktops versus on mobile devices.
As you might expect, the bounce rate on mobile devices is much higher, typically due to the kind of information being shown, the format the content is being presented in, and the need for immediacy of information the content fulfills.
Users on desktops are often performing more thorough research and spend longer amounts of time on certain webpages.
Optimizing your website for both desktop and mobile is important for creating an enjoyable user experience all around.
You also need to recognize where your primary website traffic is coming from (mobile or desktop). This will help you gauge what you need to focus on in terms of web development and user experience.
Tips for Improving Website Traffic
Let’s take a look at some of the elements you can improve to enhance your website traffic user experience:
UI/UX
UX and UI are words that often seem to be used interchangeably, and while they are closely related it’s good to have a solid understanding of what both terms mean separate from one another.
Having good UX/UI is important for improving website traffic and driving up your conversion rates.
UI stands for “user interface”, which involves the graphical elements of an app or web page.
This includes everything from text on a page, buttons users click, transitions, animations, screen layout and anything else that a site viewer interacts with or sees.
UX stands for “user experience” which pertains to the overall ease and enjoyability of use by a viewer.
his involves load times, ease of navigation, interaction with features and the ability for users to accomplish what they want on a site without feeling like it’s a struggle.
A good UX means that viewers are able to interact smoothly with the UI that the designers have built. Having optimized website performance, great site navigation tools and filter options are all a part of a good UX.
All in all, web designers create a platform, and if it feels seamless and works well then users have a good experience (UX).
Having a good UX/UI is essential for bringing traffic to your website and ensuring visitors stay and engage with your content.
Although the skillsets required to optimize both UX and UI are different, they are both integral to the overall success of a website.
If you have a great visual design, but the navigation is clunky and hard to navigate you’ll miss out on valuable conversion opportunities.
On the other side, if your website runs seamlessly and is easy to use but doesn’t have a visually appealing interface the same is true.
This requires doing some research into the typical user expectation that comes with a certain industry or product.
- More helpful reading: https://www.fannit.com/marketing-strategy/digital-marketing-campaigns-fail/
Optimize Website Performance
Optimizing your website performance will ultimately provide a better customer experience and increase your conversion rate. Search engines such as Google will also rank your site higher if it is optimized. Optimizing performance will help increase traffic and will make your marketing worth the time, money, and effort you’ve spent.
Slow loading times will ultimately kill your flow of traffic if left unaddressed.
Especially amongst mobile users, having a fast page speed will decrease your bounce rate and ensure people stick around to view your content.
Website speed is important for three main reasons: visibility, usability, and conversion.
Page speed is a factor that Google takes into consideration when ranking your site.
Websites with faster loading times are likely to have a better ranking.
Usability is important too, your goal is to create a web space that is easy to navigate and performs well for your users. Last but not least, all of this has an impact on your conversion rate.
Better visibility and usability means that you’re more likely to get the desired end result such as an email sign up, a guide download, or a sale of your product or service.
Optimizing your website’s performance means that you will be able to determine areas for improvement such as site speed, conversion rates, bounce rates, content, and help you define where your SEO efforts are needed most.
It will also help your page rank higher in the search results.
Monitoring your site will provide you with traffic statistics that will give you a leg up against your competitors.
Optimizing your content for search engines is a very valuable and worthwhile practice.
Improve Site Navigation
Website navigation is another important element of a good user experience.
The ability for a user to be able to easily find and access the information they’re looking for plays a large role in bounce rates and on overall conversion rate as well.
A website navigation menu is generally the most apparent (and important) part of this feature.
The navigation menu is typically found at the top of a website and displays the
Improve Sorting/Filter Effectiveness
While it may seem like a small detail, having the option to filter products on a search page plays a large role in a better user experience and conversion rate.
A filter button ensures the customer can set some search guidelines for how they want to browse through your products.
Having diverse filter options with an easy-to-navigate user interface is a proven strategy for increasing sales.
Through monitoring your site, you can see which groups of items visitors spend the most time looking at and either improve upon your existing filters or create new ones.
Strengthen Security Control
By monitoring your website on a regular basis, you will help enhance the safety of your site.
You can see when people accessed your page and how long they have spent on it.
It will help you combat fraudulent and suspicious activity from visitors on websites, and monitor your website’s behavior in order to look out for malicious code or cyberattack.
Website Security Can Protect Your Website From Hackers
Cyberattacks occur on a regular basis.
In fact, the University of Maryland reported that cyberattacks occur every 39 seconds
Refine Your Digital Marketing Campaigns
Monitoring your web traffic stats will help verify the effectiveness of your online campaigns.
You don’t want the money that you spend on paid ads to go to waste so it’s important to pay attention to how they’re affecting your website traffic.
It should be fairly simple to see if your online campaigns are effective by taking a look at your website traffic analytics.
An increase in traffic will be your first clue that a paid ad is working. If it’s driving more visitors to your site then you should be seeing more conversions.
This is also why it’s important to have proper tracking and documentation in place, so that you can know exactly what percentage of your traffic is rising or falling.
It’s important to keep an eye on your website traffic analytics to know what paid ad variations are doing the best so that you don’t waste money on ineffective ones.
Determining the main demographic that is responding to your ad campaigns will also help you in building out your buyer profiles and increase your effectiveness in curating content.
Develop the Right Customer Engagement Strategy
Having the right customer engagement strategy is a great way to develop a strong relationship with your customers.
Monitoring the traffic to your page will help you understand ways to engage with your customers more effectively.
An example of a strategy is to provide your customers with a pop up on the screen after a certain duration of time that they have spent on your page.
The pop up could be a promotional offer that may increase their level of engagement.
Additionally, you can have a guest posting page where customers can ask questions and post reviews.
You can monitor how much time people spend viewing the review section and see which reviews rank highest in popularity and include that content at the top of the section.
Another tip is to engage with your customers over social media.
Social media is a great way to make a customer feel important and valued if you message them directly or comment back on one of their posts.
Exploring Competitor’s Website Traffic
When you look into website traffic of sites that are not your own, there are a few pieces of data that you will want to know outside of how many visitors they are getting.
A few reasons that you should look into your competitor’s analytics are:
- To know which keywords are generating the most traffic
- To figure out which channels are producing the most traffic
- To figure out which of their posts are driving the most organic traffic
It is a bit easier to find data on your site, so let’s dive into the resources that you will need to search and analyze your competitor’s sites.
AHREFS
AHREFS is one of the most complete SEO audit tools due to its comprehensive reports.
It is a very popular tool in the SEO world because its organic search overview provides you a good idea of the kind of organic traffic that a site is getting.
Furthermore, utilizing keywords is a very important part of driving traffic to your site and AHREFS will show you which keywords are bringing in the most traffic.
You can use the data to implement keywords into your site that are bringing in traffic to your competitors.
AHREFS will only provide you traffic estimates for a site’s organic traffic and it will not tell you anything about traffic that is driven by sources such as social media.
AHREFS offers a seven-day trial but after that, you would need to start on one of their paid plans. At Fannit, we use AHREFS for most of our research due to the comprehensive reports and data that it provides
SEMrush
SEMrush is a complete SEO audit tool similar to AHREFS . It offers an extensive range of features which one of those features is the traffic estimates analytic report.
This report will share with you data such as the estimated number of unique visitors, top pages, traffic sources, and much more.
SEMrush will provide you with keywords that your competitors are ranking for.
From this data, you can use an estimator to show how much traffic each keyword is driving to your competitor’s sites.
SEMrush offers a free version that will provide you with information about the total organic traffic of a site and the top five performing keywords.
A premium subscription will provide you with a comprehensive report.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb provides an overview of a site’s total traffic, which countries traffic is coming from, and its top traffic sources.
It is important to note, SimilarWeb has a very limited pool of data and most of the time you will not be able to find results on recently launched or small websites.
SimilarWeb does offer a free version that will give you an estimate of a site’s monthly traffic and five keywords that it ranks for.
A premium version is offered if you want to know about other keywords that the site ranks for or more information about unique visitors.
SimilarWeb is a great option due to the free version that it offers. At some point, you may want to upgrade to the premium version of SimilarWeb.
SEO Ranking
SEO Ranking lets you check a site’s keywords that it ranks for and its organic traffic.
This software has a few different pricing options depending on how often you want your rankings to be updated, how many features you need, and how long you would like to be subscribed to the plan.
They also offer a 14-day free trial.
Serpstat
Serpstat offers a free and paid plan.
The free version provides you an estimate of a site’s traffic, the top ten performing pages, and its top ten keywords that it ranks for. An interesting feature that Serpstat offers is a site’s traffic evolution over time.
To receive more detailed information, you will need to subscribe to a paid plan.
Quantcast
Quantcast focuses on data for marketers or publishers who are wanting to grow their audiences.
When you sign up for Quantcast, part of your data will become publicly available.
One of the downsides to this site is that you can only access information on companies that use Quantcast, so if your competitors are not on the site then it will not be of much interest to you.
Quantcast has a limited free version, but a paid version will provide you with valuable statistics.
That being said, the statistics will only be valuable if you can search for your competitor’s data. Before signing up for the paid version, make sure to check that your competitors are using Quantcast as well.
All of these tools are valuable resources to help gain information about your competitors.
They will help you search for keywords that will help your site rank higher in the search engine result pages as well as provide valuable insight on what is working for your competitors in regards to posts and specific pages.
Just keep in mind that a lot of these tools are only providing traffic estimates.
Finding Website Traffic Data Without Tools
Here are some alternative methods for how to check website traffic stats without using any of the paid or free tools that we have touched on above.
Find “Advertise With Us” Pages
Some of your competitors may provide a list of their traffic for you to see on their sites.
Search for pages that are offering advertising or other collaboration opportunities. You will often find this information on the Advertise page of their website.
Something important to pay attention to is when their Advertise page was last updated.
If the page hasn’t been updated in six months or more, the data is most likely incorrect.
Media Kits
A media kit will include traffic stats and information about the site’s visitors.
You will also be able to find where the site has been featured.
Many sites will have their media kit on their websites, but some will link to a PDF.
The best way to search for a media kit is to type: site: domain media kit
Similar to the Advertise pages, it is important to check when the statistics were last updated to ensure that you are working with numbers that are relevant to the present day.
Now it is Time to Start Tracking your Own Website’s Traffic
If you want to check the traffic of your website, we recommend that you install Google Analytics.
This will provide you with the exact amount of traffic that you are receiving and where those visitors are coming from. This will make the job of finding out what to do next on your site much easier.
Contact Fannit Today to Get Started on Increasing Your Website Traffic!
At Fannit, we utilize our digital marketing experts to help businesses grow.
Optimizing sites to increase traffic can be overwhelming at first, but we are here to help.
Our team will work with you to help you meet your site traffic goals.
Our experts are ready to help boost your site’s traffic. Contact us today to get started.
More information about website traffic:
Recommended Article: Near Me Searches
