How many people are clicking on your website within a month or a year? The number of those people is what is referred to as online traffic. The goal of every marketer is to attract as much traffic as possible through search engine optimization. You can also drive traffic to your website through video marketing on YouTube or through social media marketing campaigns. The main reasons that you need to bring in traffic include increasing sales, boosting conversions, and reaching out to new markets and for your Holiday Marketing. But you cannot tell if you have achieved any of those objectives without knowing how much traffic you got within a specified session and how much engagement the visitors had with your content.
There are several other reasons that could prompt you to find out how much traffic your website (or blog) attracts. Perhaps you intend to know how promising or heartbreaking your numbers are so that you know whether to increase your budget for your monthly SEO package or change your SEO consultant. Maybe you spied on your competitor sites and were shocked by how great their content is, so you now want to see whether they are doing better than you are in terms of online traffic. Or maybe everyone in your niche has changed their approach to SEO and is seemingly doing better than your site, so you want to confirm or rebut your fears.
So, whatever the reason for investigating your online traffic data, we are at your service. We have researched and compiled a list of 3 tools and resources that you can leverage to get a general idea of your site’s metrics. Here we go.
1. Use GoogleAnalytics
Google Analytics is a free online resource that will help you monitor web traffic for your own site. It is also possible to use this tool to spy on your competitor’s traffic. And because this tool is a product of Google- the leading search engine in the world of the internet, you can be sure that its analysis is reliably accurate. Another positive thing about GA is that it helps not only see how much traffic your site gets but also where it is coming from. That is helpful when you want to tailor marketing content for a given demographic, or when you want to cut off funding for marketing campaigns that don’t bring you sufficient returns on investment.
However, GA isn’t for you if you don’t want the internet to read your data because this resource shares all the data it generates with Google’s monolithic ad-driven monopoly. Simply put, the tool doesn’t give you the control you need for your data’s privacy.
2. For a WP website, use Statpress plugin
If you want to boost your website traffic for a WordPress-powered site, the Statpress plugin is an invaluable tool to leverage. This resource will help you monitor web traffic and its sources. It tells you whether your visitors are humans or bots, or whether the traffic comes from organic searches. And to help you get a clearer idea of how your numbers are, this tool includes graphs and other visual representations of data. You are able to get the patterns a little more easily with such presentations.
Statpress plugins also allow you to set your target “special” visitors and notifies you when such visitors come knocking. Such unique searchers could be competitors, stakeholders, and industry opinion shapers. Statpress also provides data about the trendiest and latest 500 keyword phrases that landed searchers on your website. What’s more, this resource hands you control over your data. It is a WP self-hosted plugin, so you can use it without worrying about a security key.
3. Leverage Piwik Analytics
Piwik Analytics is a tool that is also free. Although it is an open-source analytics resource, it is better than most analytics platforms out there. The software is actually better than Google Analytics if you are to consider data security and efficiency. You will have total control over your data on this platform, so you will keep off unwanted ads on your site.
Conclusion
Although the tools above are reliably accurate, they aren’t completely foolproof. Don’t expect their data to paint a perfect picture of your web traffic. They, however, offer you a quick way to tell whether or not your SEO strategy works or not. You definitely have to make sure that your SEO strategy matches your business objectives. If you’re competing for local services, you definitely need to make the right SEO strategy adjustments for adequate local SEO services.