Once you have built a website for your business and started promoting it through SEO or paid ads, you should begin to understand and analyze the traffic you receive on your website. Understanding your web traffic is essentially understanding the visitors to your website. For this purpose, several tools are available that can help you to know more about your visitors (mentioned below).
If you are looking for a guide where you can learn different aspects of website traffic, you are in the right place. In this article, we will explain to you the definition of website traffic, reading statistics, and different elements, along with some other things. So, let’s dig deeper.
Definition of Website traffic
In simple words, website traffic refers to the users who visit a website. It’s measured in visits, also called “sessions,” – which is a common way to measure the effectiveness of online business to attract an audience.
How is Website Traffic Recorded?
When someone visits your website, its laptop, tablet, or phone communicates with the website’s server. Each webpage consists of dozens of distinct files. The website’s server transfers each file to the user’s browser, which is then formed into a cumulative piece with graphics and text.
Every file sent to the browser represents a “hit,” which means that viewing a single webpage can result in numerous hits.
Not only the traffic on the site’s homepage is monitored, but also the segments of the site are monitored continuously by the server to determine exactly how many “hits” each receives. In the web world, a single visit is known as a “session.” The detail of each session varies, yet each has its starting and ending points.
Hence servers are able to compile every useful information for its users, so they can view and determine how good or bad their site is doing and which pages are receiving the most attention. You, as a site owner, can analyze these stats to understand your visitors’ activity in a better way.
What is Website Traffic Statistics?
Once you install a website analytics tool, you can get information about the following statistics:
- Results of website optimization and promotion.
- The total number of website visitors.
- The time visitors spending on your website and pages they are viewing.
- Actions that visitors perform on your website.
- Your website’s performance.
- The percentage of the target audience visiting your site (out of the total traffic).
The right estimation and analysis of this data can help you find problems in your marketing campaigns and make it more effective than ever. If you are running an online store, you must analyze your traffic regularly to enhance your content and store accordingly.
Key Indicators of Website Traffic Statistics
We have mentioned some of the key indicators, like hits, sessions, and users in the text above. Now, let’s talk about them in detail so you can understand what you will be dealing with.
1. Sessions
In easy words, a session is a number of a website visit for a selected period. One session = one visit completed by any user. The session gets over if the visitor leaves the website or remains inactive for more than 30 minutes.
Therefore, the more sessions you see against your website’s traffics stats, the more effective your promotion strategy is going.
2. Pages / Session
The number of pages a visitor views during one session is indicated by “Pages / Session” in the analytics tool. A higher number reflects that your website or content is interesting and useful.
3. Session Duration
For example, your website receives about 500 visitors a day, and they all spend different amounts of time on your website. Some might spend about 10 minutes checking out your content and information, while others may leave within 2 minutes only. Therefore, the average time all the users spend on your website is known as Avg. Session Duration.
The longer a visitor stays on your website, the better search ranking it will have.
4. Users
The term itself is very self-explanatory. However, the total number of unique visitors that have visited your website for a selected period of time are called Users. You shouldn’t confuse the number of sessions with the number of users because they are two different things. Sessions show how many times all users have visited your website (one user can visit your site several times). As a result, the number of users will always be less than the sessions on your website.
5. Bounce Rate
The percentage of users who leave your site within 15 seconds of visiting is called the bounce rate. If your website’s bounce rate is higher, it means that it doesn’t have relevant information or data that a visitor is looking for, or they might have landed there accidentally.
Hence, you should update your site in terms of speed, content, readability, and perform various other modifications so the users can stay on your site for more time.
6. Devices
This section in the analyzing tool represents the types of devices various users use to visit your site. For example, smartphone, PC, tablet, etc.
7. Channels
The sources or mediums the users have used to reach your site are known as channels. For example, organic search, direct, email, referral, social media, generic paid search, or other.
8. Average Position
This indicates the position where your website currently lies in the search results.
9. CTR
Click-Through Rate or CTR is the ratio of impressions to the number of clicks on your webpage in search results. The better CTR you have, the better your website is performing in terms of promotion strategy.
10. Clicks
This data shows how visitors interact with various elements on your website. You can analyze your page clicks and see which things are ignored by the visitors so you can fix them to enhance your website usability and user experience.
11. Scroll map
This data shows the scroll depth on your website. Analyzing the scroll depth, you can ensure that the most important information is the most noticeable.
Top Tools to Check and Analyze Website Traffic Statistics
1. Google Analytics
Let’s talk about the best analyzing tool made by Google itself. It is indeed a must-have tool for any web resource. The best thing about it is that it provides a free service. It has almost everything that you need to optimize and promote your website.
2. Search Console
This one is also a free service provided by Google that allows you to analyze your website in terms of performance and SEO.
3. Plerdy
Plerdy is an excellent platform that helps improve your website’s user experience and grow conversions. This platform provides several useful tools, including click heat map, Popup Forms, and SEO alerts. Offering more than 80 features and capabilities for individuals and organizations, Plerdy takes only 30 seconds (or even less) to install.
How to Improve Website Traffic Quality?
If your bounce rate is very high and other stats are poor, you may want to make some changes to improve traffic quality. You can also make changes, even if your website has good stats. This step will take your website’s performance to the next level.
Improving website traffic isn’t an overnight task; it needs continuous hard work and persistence. You should improve various aspects of your website to enhance your traffic. Following are some of the elements you can begin improving:
- Navigation
One of the most crucial aspects of any website is the way you have optimized it for better navigation. Your navigation should be streamlined to give the visitors a seamless experience so they can find and access desired information on your website conveniently. A rule of thumb here would be to ensure every page on your site is easily accessible within five clicks only.
- Quality of Content
Quality content is undoubtedly the best way to attract more quality visitors to your site. And now, the demand for quality content with diversity has been increased. People don’t just want to read but also visualize the content. Hence, instead of a standard blog post, give them choices, such as podcasts, videos, infographics, interviews, whiteboard animation videos, white papers, and more.Therefore, providing a variety of content on your site can help you reach more people hence increasing your chances of attracting more quality traffic.
- Web Design
The best web design is simple yet aesthetic. Too much clutter would just drive your visitors away, as does the unattractive looks and unorganized content. The best way to make sure that your design is doing well is to test different components of your site. To do that, you can run A/B tests on various elements on your site, including themes, color schemes, content types, etc. This will give you insights on what your target audience prefers the most.
- Social Media Strategy
As already discussed above, there are several ways you can generate traffic to your website. One of the best ways today is social media. To gain the right audience from your social media handles, you should ensure that your social media strategy revolves around targeting the right people. Visitors who are educated about your business are more likely to convert once they come to your website.
Final Verdict
We hope that guide us useful in understanding website traffic. Just make sure to provide quality over quantity. Don’t focus on generating high traffic. Instead, focus on bringing more quality traffic or the type of visitors who want, need, and are willing to purchase whatever you are selling.