As a manager of your online presence, website owners need to make sure that their website doesn’t drop out of relevance by taking measures to measure and track the activity on and around their websites. But what do you use to measure your performance to get an idea of your starting point?
These data points are called web analytics and tell you exactly what’s going on after you’ve built your website. Web analytics tools give you hard numbers and relevant data to give you an idea of how your site is doing. Adding numbers to an idea gives you a jumping-off point on how you’re doing now and gives you projections on where and how you can improve.
Why should you track your web analytics?
The short answer is simply understanding the importance of feedback and improvement. Understanding your web analytics with a good website traffic tracker can be a huge return of investment when you know your site is doing its job reaching your customers and clients as designed. The key gains of using web analytics tools include:
Improving your lead generation. When you understand where your website visitors are coming from, what pages they look at, and even who they are, you can utilize this data from website traffic tracking to be able to better adapt your site and content to reach more of your target demographic. Whether you use the data gained to drive more effective, personalized campaigns, update your website for increased conversion, or directly follow up new leads, tracking your website visitors increases your lead generation success beyond creating good content.
Understanding your audience. An audience analysis can give you a granular view of your traffic’s interests and location among other data points. When you’re telemarketing or running a digital marketing campaign such as a promo or giveaway, you can view website traffic reports that show the number of people coming into your website during a given period. Compare the numbers for 1-day, 7-day and 30-day periods to measure audience interest and engagement. If you see the numbers drastically decreasing, there is a high chance that your message is failing to resonate well with your visitors.
Promote your lead quality. Website traffic tracking can give businesses all the information needed to create a successful lead scoring system. This ensures only the highest quality leads, with the best chance of becoming clients are passed on to your sales and marketing team. This helps boost the ROI on your website traffic tracker, whilst contributing to an improved lead nurture strategy.
Advanced website visitor trackers can alert your sales team to pipeline leads visiting your website. This helps your sales team take instant, timely action to improve sales movement and follow-up each important interaction with communications tailored to their business needs. This enables your team to monitor and improve your sales both in real time and up front, by keeping your brand and products on your website responsive.
The best web analytics tools will give you comprehensive assessments of how your website and other online profiles are performing on searches, clicks, and other interactions and may even be able to tell you where you can start to make changes. The best web analytics tools can give you a specific understanding of who’s viewing your site, how many people are using your products - or are looking for them, how long visitors spend time on your website, and other valuable insights that can communicate your areas of improvement in terms of both marketing and user-experience.
Most website builders actually come with a website traffic tracker free within their set plans and give you additional web analytics tools over time, should you choose to upgrade into a paid domain plan - but be wary. It’s important to go into using a website traffic tracker knowing your site goals, but remember that the best web analytics are useless if you don’t know what you’re using your data for.
By this we mean to keep in mind the kind of stats you should be looking out for that best reflects your website’s use. A blog might need to look at the numbers of visitors vs readers and how long these users spend time on their pages. A personal website may need to look at where their site visitors are coming from and which aspects of their portfolio people are interacting with the most. Online stores may need to look at more data points - from conversions, collections, and impressions from both their products, newsletters, and other elements of their content marketing.
When you own a website or you’re in charge of managing one, it is crucial to stay on top of your site’s performance to determine if your website is fulfilling the objectives for which it was created. Strikingly for example has an internal website traffic tracker called the Analytics Dashboard that gives you an overview of how many visitors are coming into your site. It breaks down traffic sources according to the platform (e.g. social media, direct traffic, search engine, etc.) and provides information about which country your users are coming from. But if you want a more granular view - and you should, there are a lot of other website traffic trackers to try in conjunction with the Analytics Dashboard. Here are some of them.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is arguably the most popular and the most powerful website traffic tracker today. This tool gives exact data on your website’s performance depending on the metrics and goals you set in it. You get traffic insights according to the country, state and city, according to the device used (mobile, desktop) and traffic sources. It also gives you information on keywords used to search for your content which can help you tweak your SEO strategy and optimize your website further. The best part of all: you can get this tool for free. All you need to do is add a tracking code on your website to enable Google Analytics to extract data from it.
2. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is one of the great web analytics tools for ethically “spying” on your competitor websites. It is a website views tracker that lets you monitor website performance for other websites, giving you such information as bounce rates, traffic stats, time on site, etc. On a free account, you get to view the top 50 websites in every category. If you want to know more about what makes your competitors successful, or if you want to take a leaf out of their digital marketing book and copy some of their strategies, this one tool to try out.
3. SEMRush
SEMRush is mainly used as an SEO tool but it can be a good website traffic tracker as well. It may not give you exact traffic figures but the estimate will still come in handy for checking your site performance against similar sites. It also gives insights on other aspects of digital marketing such as your brand’s web presence on social media platforms.
4. SiteMeter
SiteMeter is popularly used by bloggers on one end and complex and content heavy websites on the other end of the spectrum. Using a free account, it gives fairly reliable and the best web analytics insights on visit durations, traffic sources and referral links. With a paid account, you get a little bit more detail on website statistics.
5. Awstats
This website traffic tracker is commonly used on a lot of web hosting service providers. If you’re using a server or a web host that doesn’t have its own internal analytics dashboard like Strikingly does, you’ll probably be advised to install Awstats. The tool provides relevant information on the pages and types of files visitors are looking at. What makes it interesting is that it also allows you to see what routes visitors took before finally landing on your website. I
How do I choose the Website Traffic Tracker For Me?
There’s a lot of debate over the best website traffic tracker today. The answer really depends on your level of experience and how much data you want to see. Choosing Google Analytics for your website, for instance, feels pretty overwhelming for a lot of beginners because of the sheer volume of data it churns out but once you learn how to manipulate the filters and customize the views according to what information you want to see, having this tool available might work to your advantage. Same goes for other tools in the market. We suggest that you explore all possibilities until you arrive at a tool that suits your data requirements.
Regardless, the best way to maximize a website traffic tracker - whichever one you choose, is to know how to understand and interpret your data to reach your site goals. If you’re new to reading analytics, it can be overwhelming to keep track of the data you need to get from your site and even more intimidating to learn how to interpret the numbers into actionable conclusions for action. Strikingly’s in-platform website traffic tracker can give you some basic insights to start and with 24/7 customer service, you can contact our support team to help you at any time you run into a few hiccups.
Track your site performance with a powerful website traffic tracker today and set yourself up for success.
