OWOX BI collects all of this data automatically without sampling so you can create a phenomenal database for all kinds of reports: LTV, ROPO, historical analysis, forecasted marketing plan performance. Have you ever dreamed about a tool that would give you a ROPO report in one click?
Importance of Web Traffic Analysis and Monitoring
Analyzing traffic data about your site is an important process for promoting online, increasing search traffic and sales. Regardless of how big your site is and how many users it has, you should have a regular site audit. With it, you’ll get information about your user’s sources, check website visitors, your closest competitors, and what you need to fix to optimize your resource.
If you’re not examining how your site is performing and what results you’re achieving, then you’re missing out on potential visits and users every day. Every day there are new engagement metrics to measure a site’s success, but the basics in website traffic check remain.
Any site owner should monitor website traffic analysis and the audience’s sources to use this information to their advantage. The better and more detailed data you process, the better results you will get, and the better you can improve your resource.
Tools To Check And Analyze Website Traffic Statistics
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is a must-have for any web resource. This is a free service that has almost everything you need to promote and optimize a website. If, for any reason, you haven’t installed it yet, here is a link with a manual from the GoogleAnalytics team. is another handy analytics tool. This analog of Google Analytics is used to collect and analyze the data from the Yandex Search engine. Yet, since Google Search is much more popular, we will analyze traffic using Google Analytics in this article. is a free service provided by Google that allows analyzing website SEO and performance. Follow this link for a detailed installation manual. is a platform that helps to improve website UX and grow conversions. It includes several tools such as a click heatmap, PopUp forms, and SEO alerts. With over 80 features and capabilities for online marketers, the Plerdy script takes less than 30 seconds to install. Follow the link to learn how to install Plerdy.
Let’s review each of the indicators based on the example of an online store of travel equipment. For a more detailed and in-depth analysis, we have selected the period from April 1 to April 30. Therefore, all the provided data is related to this period.
Website Statistics Analysis: CTR
Our online store of travel equipment had an average 4% CTR during the analyzed period.
There is no fixed or ideal value for a CTR. You must regularly take measures to increase it. To achieve a better result, try to improve the Title and Description of pages and continuously expand your semantic kernel.
For this analysis, you should use an analytics tool offered by Plerdy. It’s easy to install and provides valuable information on website performance. For example, to find out how many clicks users make on website elements, complete the following steps:
How to analyze website traffic
Main dimensions
Choosing the right dimension-metric combination, you can find a lot of useful insights for your website development. Wouldn’t it be great if someone could recall all the dimension-metric combinations for you? OWOX BI Smart Data knows popular dimension-metric combinations to build any kind of report in a couple of clicks, without hours of thinking over the report structure.
Segmentation
Segments offer a great possibility for analysts to compare part of the traffic with the whole picture. Comparing segments to other segments or to total data, you can conduct simple analysis that might be useful for beginners.
Segments are important based on the understanding that aggregate data can’t help you a lot («All data in aggregate is crap,» according to Avinash Kaushik, who knows what he’s talking about). But if you slice and dice your data the right way, you’ll see many interesting insights.
The other way to use segments is to create them for better performance of remarketing, trigger emails, and special offer campaigns. You can read about how to create a special audience segment and optimize your marketing campaign with OWOX BI in our Butik case study.
Main metrics
As Peter Drucker once said, «You can’t manage what you don’t measure.» But measuring on its own is a dead end. Explaining and interpreting — that’s how you get profit from measuring. So be careful with metrics; don’t forget about the real people standing behind them.
This report will help you understand if your website audience is growing. Also, pay attention to the Returning Visitor metric, as it will inform you if people like to come back (and give you a chance to encourage them to make a purchase).
This group of metrics shows your visitors’ behavior on the website: whether they’re active and interested — Average Session Duration metric, how long they stay on the site — Page / Sessions metric, how fast they leave the site — Bounce Rate, etc. Also, in the device and platform dimensions, you can find insights about how page loading speed and website presentation on different devices influence your visitors’ behavior. Sometimes, waiting for the page to load is painful and people leave the website; the bounce rate starts growing, and you can notice this to make improvements.
This is another dimension to investigate. Looking at all behavioral metrics at the level of pages will help you understand the most popular and least popular pages and give a hint about what to do to improve the situation. For example, if one of your checkout pages is among the popular exit pages, it might be a sign of technical problems.
You may track a lot of events on your website, from a simple click anywhere on the page to conversion events: purchases, email subscriptions, comments and feedback, etc. Why do you have to track all of these events? If you want to grow, you should look at keywords your customers are entering in the search bar and identify the most popular and least popular buttons.
If you imagine a way to get from anywhere on the internet to making a purchase on your site, you can see that’s a long path. Or a funnel, as marketers call it. Website analytics tools help you understand the sequence of channels that lead a visitor to make a conversion and show the importance of each channel.
If you see that your typical sequence has more than three channels, your search for the perfect attribution model becomes harder. Standard models won’t fit your needs, as one of the channels will be overvalued and others will be undervalued.
Find out how to solve this attribution problem with OWOX BI.
As you see, metrics and investigations are waiting for you. You can explore more marketing metrics in this article. Remember one more thing while working with metrics and statistics: they’re always dynamic, and the change in values matters more than today’s or yesterday’s values on their own.
Sources:
https://sitechecker.pro/traffic-checker/
https://www.plerdy.com/blog/website-traffic-and-how-to-check/
https://www.owox.com/blog/use-cases/web-traffic-analytics/
Website traffic
SimilarWeb will return a report that starts with a similar global and regional rank score, followed immediately by traffic estimates and site engagement figures. Traffic estimates are further broken down by channels, including search engines and referring domains. The very end of the report also provides a list of estimated top competitors and some audience overlap data, similar to the competitor reports available from Alexa.
Comparing Your Competitors’ Website Traffic Stats
In digital reporting, context is critical. Our marketing efforts don’t exist in a vacuum and in addition to broader consumer and economic trends, companies face fierce competition for share of voice and online sales.
In an increasingly competitive environment, benchmarking becomes important for any organization to properly evaluate their performance. In growing markets, it’s possible to see a rise in traffic and sales and be losing market share. In shrinking markets, you can see decreased sales while growing overall market share.
One of the best ways to determine which way is truly “up” is to benchmark some of your competition to provide you with the context you need to best interpret your own digital marketing results. While there is no universal source of competitor intelligence, there are a few different options at our disposal. In this post, we’ll cover the inexact science of how to compare your competitors’ website traffic stats, using Alexa, Similarweb, SEMRush and benchmarking in Google Analytics.
How to increase traffic to your website with SEO
So there’s one problem with all of the strategies above. They’re not going to drive traffic to your site if no one can find them. And with the first page of Google capturing 71% of search traffic clicks, you need an SEO strategy.
Target keywords…
Keywords are the words and phrases people type into search engines, and as you can imagine, some keywords get searched more than others. Using keyword research tools, you can see, for example, that the keyword “how to increase website engagement” only gets about 10 searches per month while how to increase website traffic gets 300 searches.
…long-tail keywords
Place your keywords strategically
This is the bread and butter of on-page SEO—where you optimize your content so that search engines can understand what it’s about and rank it in relevant searches. Be sure to place your target keyword in the following locations:
Optimize your SERP appearance
Link internally
When creating and publishing content, be sure to add at least 1-3 links to other pages on your site to that page. This will help drive traffic to those pages, but also, it (a) keeps visitors on your site longer, (b) gets them to view more pages on your site, and (c) allows them to get more value out of your site—all of which improve your ranking and drive more traffic to your website.
Improve your page speed
Ever found yourself waiting thirty seconds for a webpage to load? Me neither. If your site takes forever to load, your bounce rate will be sky-high. Speed has always been a ranking factor, but even more so now with the page experience update. Make sure that your pages are as technically optimized as possible, including image file sizes, page structure, and the functionality of third-party plugins. The faster your site loads, the better.
Make your site responsive
Today, more traffic occurs on mobile than desktop, so if you’re making your visitors pinch and scroll their way around your site, you’re basically telling them to go elsewhere. Even if you have a basic website, you still need to ensure that it is accessible and comfortably viewable across a range of devices, including smaller smartphones.
Implement Schema markup
Implementing Schema markup (or another microdata format) won’t necessarily increase traffic to your website on its own, but it will make it easier for search engine bots to find and index your pages. Another benefit of using schema for SEO is that it can result in better rich site snippets, which can improve click-through rates.
Regularly refresh your content
Even the most evergreen content loses its luster over time, and content freshness is a ranking factor. Even if your post is still ranking on the first page of Google, you’d be surprised at what a content refresh can do. A new publish date on the SERP can significantly increase CTR and bump you up a few positions, which can lead to a surge in traffic.
Get backlinks
One of the most influential Google ranking factors is the quantity and quality of links to your website. The more links you have from credible sites with high Domain Authority, the more you increase your own Domain Authority. The higher your DA, the higher your rank and the higher your traffic—not to mention any traffic you get to your site from the link itself.
How to increase traffic to your website using social media
Promote your content on social
It’s not enough to produce great content and hope that people find it. Promote your content on the most popular social media channels for your audience. Twitter is ideal for short, snappy (and tempting) links, whereas Google Business posts can help your site show up in local search results. If you’re a B2C product company, you might find great traction with image-heavy social sites like Pinterest and Instagram.
Add hashtags
When sharing your content on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and other hashtag-friendly sites, include relevant hashtags to improve the reach of your posts. Keep the hashtags highly specific to the topic of the post, however, so you can get discovered by people most likely to read, share, and/or link to your content. Our guide to Instagram hashtags has everything you need for this.
Target amplifiers
Post native LinkedIn articles
The world’s largest professional social network is a valuable publishing platform in its own right, which means you should be posting content to LinkedIn on a regular basis. Doing so can boost traffic to your site, drive more visitors to your LinkedIn Company Page, and increase your reputation within your industry. And you don’t have to reinvent the wheel—write a reflection piece on a recent topic or repurpose content you’ve already written.
Interview industry thought leaders
Think interviews are only for the big leaguers? You’d be amazed how many people will be willing to talk to you if you just ask them. Send out emails requesting an interview with thought leaders in your industry and publish the interviews on your blog. Not only will the name recognition boost your credibility and increase traffic to your website, but the interviewee will also probably share the content too, further expanding its reach.
Add social share buttons
Research the competition
If you haven’t used software like BuzzSumo to check out what your competitors are up to, you’re at a disadvantage. These services aggregate the social performance of specific sites and content to provide you with an at-a-glance view of what topics are resonating with readers and, most importantly, making the rounds on social media. Find out what people are reading (and talking about), and emulate that kind of content to bring traffic to your website.
Post at the right time
If you’re looking to get into the weeds here, you can also take a look at your social media analytics to find the times of the day and week that get the most engagement from your audience and then share your blog post links then. Start with the overall average best times and dig into the data to refine from there.
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About the Authors
Kelly Main
Before joining the team, Kelly Main worked as an analyst at firms like Lincoln Financial Group. She has also founded a number of successful startups, including OpenOnion under the Google Tech Entrepreneurs Program, which was later acquired under the name Whisper.
Maria Roberta Benitez
Roberta Benitez has brought more than five years of writing experience prior to her work at Fit Small Business. Before joining the team, she primarily worked in startups, where she still does freelance work in her spare time. She has extensive experience in writing about a variety of topics from marketing and business to gaming and culture. Now she writes for the Sales and Marketing group, informing readers about the best way to create their own small business websites.
Sources:
https://www.megalytic.com/blog/comparing-your-competitors-website-traffic-stats
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/08/14/increase-traffic-to-my-website
https://fitsmallbusiness.com/how-to-check-website-traffic/
Website traffic
The best, most powerful content in the world is keyword-driven linkbait. No, you probably can’t generate viral content from most search-driven pieces, but the value from those pieces will almost always be higher. And you can still generate 40-100+ links for these, which will move the needle for your bottom funnel in the exact same way.
Traffic Sources
Beyond organic and direct traffic, you must understand the difference between all of your traffic sources and how traffic is classified. Most web analytics platforms, like Google Analytics, utilize an algorithm and flow chart based on the referring website or URL parameters that determine the source of traffic. Here is a breakdown of all sources:
- Direct: Any traffic where the referrer or source is unknown
- Email: Traffic from email marketing that has been properly tagged with an email parameter
- Organic: Traffic from search engine results that is earned, not paid
- Paid search: Traffic from search engine results that is the result of paid advertising via Google AdWords or another paid search platform
- Referral: Traffic that occurs when a user finds you through a site other than a major search engine
- Social: Traffic from a social network, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram
- Other: If traffic does not fit into another source or has been tagged as “Other” via a URL parameter, it will be bucketed into “Other” traffic
Best Tools to Check Website Traffic
1. CMS Hub
With HubSpot’s traffic analytics tool, you can view traffic by topic cluster, source, device type, country, and more. You can also change the report’s date range and frequency, export and save the report, and filter data by specific analytics views like country and subdomain.
What’s unique about this tool is that it allows you to change the chart visualization style. So say you’re looking at page views. You can choose an area chart, column chart, line chart, or a combination of an area and line chart to visualize the data.
2. Google Analytics
Most analytics tools will allow you to check your overall website traffic, or your traffic within a certain time period. But Google Analytics is unique in that it will not only track user volume by day and hour — it will also track the number of users on your site right now, and which pages they’re viewing. You can also see their geographic locations, the keywords and sites that referred them, and conversions as they happen.
This real-time reporting enables you to monitor the immediate effects that new campaigns and site changes have on your traffic. You can see, for example, if new content or updates are being viewed, if a promotion is driving traffic to your site and app, or if a blog, tweet, or other type of social media post is affecting traffic.
3. SEMRush
SEMRush is an all-in-one tool suite for improving visibility and discovering insights for SEO, PPC, keyword research, and competitive research, among other services. It excels in competitive research in particular.
You can analyze up to 100 sites from a custom list at one time, check their traffic metrics and compare them to your own and other competitors side by side. You can see what your competitors’ top pages are, what regions most of their traffic is coming from, and which referring sites are sending them the most traffic. You can also gather insights into your competitors’ audience and their activity, like what websites they visit while navigating to and from competitor sites and how much of their audience overlaps with other competitors.
4. Similarweb
While some tools only estimate organic traffic (ie. traffic from search engines), SimilarWeb estimates total traffic. This allows you to see the different places that visitors come from before landing on your site. Possible channels include search engines, forums, social media sites, and other sources.
5. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the best organic traffic estimation tools. It provides estimated monthly visits from Google worldwide, estimated number of keywords in the top 100 that the website ranks for in Google, and estimated traffic value (the equivalent cost of monthly organic traffic for the website if bought via PPC). Ahrefs’ estimates are based on ranking data from a database of 12 billion keywords, which is the largest of all similar tools in the market.
You should consider using Ahrefs with a total traffic estimation tool like HubSpot or Similarweb. If you notice that organic search is driving the majority of traffic to your site, you can use Ahrefs to dig deeper and see how organic traffic has changed over time, what pages for bringing the most organic traffic to your site, and more.
How to Increase Website Traffic
Brian uses the metaphor of a skyscraper for this technique to elicit the idea that to stand out in a city, you need to build the biggest skyscraper. Nobody cares about the 8th biggest skyscraper—they only care about the tallest.
Misinterpretations of the Technique
I fully believe in Brian’s idea. It’s an immensely effective method of building your business and hitting that 250,000+ traffic goal. However, the technique is not without its critics—and I believe this is due to how Brian simplified the concept.
In essence, if you read the post on the Skyscraper Technique, Dean essentially says that in creating the best thing for a given keyword, and then building a ton of links to the page based on that quality, you’ll have enough for that page to rank. This isn’t always true.
The element left out is the need for domain authority. If you’re starting from scratch and going against CNN, The New York Times and Business Insider, 40 links to a single page won’t be enough. You’ll need more combined authority in order to outpace them, even if their pages don’t stack up to yours.
It’s possible to build best-in-class content for a keyword, generate 40 links and then keep building similar content to eventually get that page ranking #1. But that’s not the fastest growth model—and most businesses would like to see the revenue and benefit from ranking other pages in the interim.
How to Use KOB Analysis to Accelerate Growth
Using a popular tool such as SEMRush or Ahrefs, Traffic Cost shows the hypothetical value of a page. Traffic Cost estimates the traffic a page is getting by estimating clickthrough rate (CTR), and then multiplying it against all the positions it ranks for.
This gives us an estimated Traffic Cost, which is a strong estimate of the real value of a page. We use page-level Traffic Cost, and think less about individual keywords, because keywords are becoming less relevant after Google’s Hummingbird update.
Given that, what we really need to do is grab the page ranking #1 for the main keyword, dump it into a rankings tool, and see what other keywords that page ranks for—showing the true “topic value” of that keyword set.
Looking at Keyword Difficulty gives us a quick snapshot of the competition on a given keyword set, to allow us to determine difficulty. Although we can’t really glean topic difficulty at this given time, grabbing the difficulty of one of the biggest keywords is a pretty good indicator of the entire topic set—so we’ll do that.
Although Traffic Cost is a great metric to start with, and scales well throughout a team of beginners, it is suggested you modify those numbers appropriate to your own business. Not every topic will be valuable to you, and it’s possible some topics will be even more valuable than the metric listed. Proceed as appropriate.
We uncover this using Ahrefs and the search results. Go to Google, and grab the number one result—or whatever result you think you are capable of creating 10x content for. In this case, that result is the “What is Content Marketing?” page from CMI.
We need to ladder up to taking a shot at it, even with amazing content—because we won’t be able to touch page one without more domain authority. We’ll get to that soon in our upcoming section on choosing the right topic.
Scaling Keyword Research
Building from There—Hard Work
In my experience, good keyword research—beyond the above quick hacks—basically comes down to hard work. Get creative, grab lots of different keyword variants, use phrase matches to grab a massive list of relevant terms and revise from there. Then repeat.
That’s not to say there aren’t lots of more detailed, in-depth resources on the topic to help you build on your list. I can go on from there, but it’s slightly outside the scope of this post to do so. If you’re a keyword research newbie, I recommend checking out some of the following articles, which go into more depth on the topic:
KOB Research Process Example
Click the below image and you’ll see a list of 100 topics, including traffic cost and traffic numbers, we built out for our own content marketing business. You can copy the spreadsheet and clear out the data to make it pertinent to your own business.
Sources:
https://www.smartbugmedia.com/blog/what-is-the-difference-between-direct-and-organic-search-traffic-sources
https://blog.hubspot.com/website/check-website-traffic
https://www.siegemedia.com/strategy/increase-website-traffic