One of the most important aspects of running a successful website is analyzing your traffic. It is a constant balancing act between keeping your traffic both relevant and engaged. But how do you know what works? With so many tools available, which analytical tools should you use to compute website traffic?
To find the answer, we’ve done all the work for you. In this post, we outline what we think are the top five analytical tools to compute website traffic today. Read on to discover how each of these can help with your analytics whether it’s for content marketing, conversion optimization or just general management of your website.
So, let’s get started.
What is Website Traffic Analysis?
Website traffic analysis is a process by which you look at your website traffic and find out the number of unique visitors that have visited your site in a certain period. The internet has helped so many people who want to sell their products, services or generate leads. Analytical tools are being used by people who want to know about their website traffic and also about their income or business. You can use analytical tools for purposes like:
- Compute the number of global or local website traffic
- Compute the number of website traffic from your country
- Compute the number of website traffic from a specific geographical area
How Do Website Traffic Analytical Tools Work?
There are two different kinds of website traffic analytics tools. The first one is known as an on-site analytic tool. These are the ones that you install within your website or blog, like with Google Analytics. It collects data on the visitors of your site like the number of pages they view, what country they belong to, how old they are and many more. It stores this information in your database or a file on your computer based on what type of tracking system you use. For example, all data and the traffic of the free SVG icons website is stored and monitored by it.
The other type is the off-site analytical tool. This is the one that you install on your computers or mobile devices, like Google Alert and Alexa. They collect information regarding your site or blog’s performance throughout the internet. They depend on another site to post an invisible image, called a tracker that can recognize your site. It then keeps records of all this information throughout the internet and then stores it within a file on your computer.
Top 5 Analytical Tools to Compute the Website Traffic
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is free to use, and they’re constantly updating and improving their service, which means that it’s always relevant and up-to-date with the latest features. A simple dashboard gives you all the data you need, including the demographics of your visitors, the sources of traffic to your site (including keywords and search terms), and conversions (how people are interacting with your site).
If you need more in-depth data, Google Analytics gives you the opportunity to look at your traffic on a deeper level. You can see small spikes in activity and how different browsers affect visitors – it’s all there to be analyzed. And, with Google Analytics, you can easily connect your site to AdWords.
This means that you can see the impact of your PPC campaigns on SEO, as well as how they interact together. You can also see how much traffic you’re getting from other sources, like YouTube and Google+.
And, if you have a mobile app, this is an excellent way of tracking visitor behavior. It also allows you to see your inbound links, which are essential data that form part of your website analytics.
Alexa
Alexa is an excellent resource for website traffic analysis, particularly as it’s also free to use. It’s a tool that scrapes data from websites and gives you information about their audience and traffic, as well as various other factors that affect site usability.
Some of the important elements include ratings, category ranking and search engine optimization. You can also compare up to three sites with one another on a single page – this makes comparison easy.
Alexa is owned by Amazon, which means that people can also use it to check out their company’s ranking. It’s a good way of identifying how well you’re doing against the competition. However, Alexa makes a distinction between sites that are ‘eligible for rating’ – in other words, those that have generated 25,000 unique visitors over three months.
One downside of Alexa is that it’s US-centric. This means that you may find your site ranking differently within different countries or regions – although this service can still be quite useful for analyzing your website traffic.
Google AdWords
Google AdWords allows you to use keywords in your ads, which means that you can track the number of times people search for a particular phrase. This is particularly useful if you’re running a PPC campaign as it allows you to see how successful your efforts have been.
It’s also connected with Google Analytics and gives you data on conversions – i.e., how many people are interacting with your site and actually going on to purchase something or make a booking.
Another great feature is the keyword metrics, which allows you to see how many people are searching for the keyword and how much traffic your website gets from it. If you pay AdWords, you can access all this information in full – but even if you don’t, you’re still able to evaluate some of the data.
HubSpot
HubSpot’s strength is in its conversion funnel analysis. It allows you to see where people are dropping out of the process – i.e., what’s going wrong and why they’re not making a purchase or booking.
Moreover, it integrates with Google Analytics and gives you a comprehensive overview of how your website performs across different platforms. You can also compare data from previous months and see how your SEO campaign is doing across different platforms.
Moreover, HubSpot allows you to integrate with your Gmail account and also offers a CRM, which means that you can collect email addresses and stay in touch with your customers. This is great for business to business – particularly small companies that don’t have a lot of staff.
SEMrush
SEMrush is probably the most useful tool on this list. It allows you to analyze keywords, website traffic, and other factors in detail, and use that information to improve your website’s SEO. You can upload a list of keywords and see how competitive the search market is for them – how many times they show up in Google and other search engines.
You can also see how much traffic your site gets from keywords – which you can then compare to losses due to lost rankings. This allows you to identify which keywords are causing your site to drop in rank.
Additionally, you can see how many people are visiting your website from other sites, which will give you a better idea of whether the keywords that you’re using for SEO are popular. By looking at all this information, the keyword research tool can help you target the right niche and get more traffic.
Wrapping Up
There are a number of great tools out there that can help you to track your website traffic in more detail. That said, it doesn’t always make sense to use these tools – particularly if you’re a small business without a budget. Even so, it’s worth setting up Google Analytics and Alexa or SEMrush – this will give you an idea of whether your site is performing well and what keywords are most popular with your audience.