Use these 3 web traffic tools to discover obvious opportunities for quick wins. Know where your web traffic is coming from for a big boost.
This is part 5 of a 6-part series on website marketing by increasing traffic to your website by ensuring search engines know what your website is about.
You Should Take These Web Traffic Secrets Very Seriously
This is one of the most important sections of running a successful website and yet so few people take it seriously!
If you love details there is more than enough to keep you entertained for weeks!
If you hate details, you can configure nice big high-level graphs to get a quick grasp of everything.
There’s something for everyone!
Let me explain. Let’s say you have £1000 per month you’re spending on various marketing and let’s say you’re getting leads from 4 sources.
- Source 1 = get’s you 20 leads.
- Source 2 = get’s you 50 leads.
- Source 3 = get’s you 100 leads.
- Source 4 = get’s you 200 leads.
While you might think source 1 is the worst, what if with a little analytics you see:
- Source 1 = get’s you 20 leads = 20 sales @£200 = £4 000
- Source 2 = get’s you 50 leads = 20 sales @£100 = £1 000
- Source 3 = get’s you 100 leads = 50 sales @£75 = £3 500
- Source 4 = get’s you 200 leads = 75 sales @£100 = £7 500
Can you see how critical it is in deciding where to allocate your budget?
Without this, you would have removed the budget from Source 1, when actually you should be putting as much budget to this source as possible!
Unless you know who is visiting your website and how they’re getting there, you’re basically flying blind.
Analytics tools help remove the mystery by giving you actionable information about site visitors.
Are you receiving all the social media benefits? Make sure you do by reading our detailed article!
Here are the major reasons for using analytics.
5 Reasons You Should Understand Your Web Traffic
Web Traffic Secret #1 Keyword Insights
You may be under the impression that just because you’re a small business owner, you’re closer to the customer and understand the words and phrases that are driving people to your site.
In truth, analytics gives you proof through the data.
Analytics provides insight into which words are the big drivers to your site.
It also not only shows you how many people searched the term but also if they are new or returning visitors and how long they stayed.
Web Traffic Secret #2 Customer Insight
Now that you understand what your customers are looking for, it gives you a better idea of who they are, how they behave, and how they segment their keywords, and compare it to how you are segmenting.
With this data, you’ll find the most interesting ways your customers behave.
Web Traffic Secret #3 Social Insight
This insight allows you to readjust the precious manpower and money to maybe one channel more so than the other. These social insights allow you to:
- Identify the traffic coming to your site and what that traffic does on your site
- Understand which of your social channels are the top performers with your target audience
- And equips you with the right data to make more informed decisions
Web Traffic Secret #4 Page Quality
Page analytics can give you insight to how your site is helping users meet their needs, or if they are simply coming then going.
This includes data on how each page on your site is performing by whether or not it is sending potential leads down the funnel to conversion.
Web Traffic Secret #5 Trends
But make sure you’re not drawing conclusions too quickly.
Ensure that with the trends and segmentation, you can find what is driving people away from your site.
With that in mind, let’s look at the 3 analytics tools that you can choose from.
3 Tools You Can Use To Understand Your Web Traffic
You need to know what’s going on. Here are the best tools you can use.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most popular free analytics packages available. Once you create an account, you are asked to insert a few lines of JavaScript on your site.
After that code is in place, you’ll be able to start monitoring your site’s traffic through the Google Analytics interface.
For a quick overview, check out the Google Analytics Feature List.
Currently, the interface is divided into 5 main sections
- Audience (information about the people visiting your site)
- Advertising (information about your site’s advertising campaigns)
- Traffic Sources (information about where your site’s traffic is originating from)
- Content (information about your site’s most popular pages)
- Conversions (information about your site’s goal completions and sales conversions)
While it may seem that Google analytics has a simple interface it’s jam-packed with features and it takes a lot of learning and time to get to grips with all the metrics and reports available.
If you love data this tool is for you but I can tell you right now you’ll probably get overwhelmed!
For more reading on website data and analytics why not have a look at Avinash Kaushik’s website?
He’s got some great detailed case studies for the most hardcore of data junkies!
Piwik Analytics
There’s a lot of web apps today that can track your site’s analytics.
Tools of this kind can be pretty pricey (unless you’re using the industry default, Google Analytics), and they also involve entrusting a third party with all of your precious visitor data.
For your own and your visitors’ privacy, one of the best options if you want the best for your data and your users can be to handle this yourself.
However, this requires a lot of time if you’re making it from scratch and that’s where Piwik comes in.
It’s a free, open-source app that’s definitely a worthy alternative to the other web analytics apps.
It’s self-hosted, so you own all of your data and can be sure that you’ve always got it in a format that isn’t restricted by another app’s export regulations.
Also, due to the nature of open-source projects (and the fact that Piwik is pretty popular), it’s regularly updated by a core team of developers, so the latest stable version is always available to download and install onto as many servers as needed, absolutely free of charge.
Clicky Analytics
These Are The 8 Top Reasons We Love Clicky
#1 Everything Is Real Time
Everything in Clicky is up-to-the-minute real-time. Not just a few things (*cough* Google Analytics). Everything.
#2 Ridiculous Detail
Most reports provide a high level of detail on every segment of visitors.
You can filter and sort by any column to quickly find what’s working and what needs improvement.
#3 Easy To Use
Clicky is designed to just make sense. We just love this part of it!
#4 Individual Visitors & Actions
Clicky lets you see every visitor and every action they take on your website, with the option to attach custom data to visitors, such as usernames or email addresses.
Analyze each visitor individually and see their full history.
#5 Heatmaps
In addition to standard per-page heatmaps, Clicky also lets you view heatmaps for individual visitor sessions, including segmentation.
For example, you can view heatmaps only for visitors who completed a specific goal.
Heatmap data is real-time.
#6 On-Site Analytics
You (and only you) will see the on-site analytics widget in the corner of your website.
See you how many total visitors are on your site and how many are on the page you’re currently viewing, with the ability to view those visitors right from the widget.
Heatmaps and heatmap segmentation can be launched from the widget as well.
#7 Uptime Monitoring
Clicky alerts you when your site goes offline so you can react immediately.
Your site’s uptime is monitored from 5 geographic locations around the world and alerts are only sent when a majority of the monitoring servers agree that your site is down.
What’s Next?
Most importantly,
Ensure your reports show you important information that you can take actionable steps to improve.
For this, you will need custom web traffic reports specific to your website. These can be very tricky to set up, but once done, you will be amazed at the results.
We realise that configuring advanced web traffic reports is a job for an expert. If you need a little help with this have a look at our ‘Web Analytics‘ app.
You’ve just finished part 5, please click on the link below to view the last article in the series!
3 Tips From Successful Websites to Set you up for Success
If you’d like to get ahead and quickly identify areas where you can improve your web presence, have a look at the ‘Lab41 Website SEO AUDIT‘.
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