How Do I Track Traffic On My Website

/ Analytics /

For those who already have a blog or website, the following question quickly comes to mind.

1. How successful is your website?
2. how many visitors visit my website?
3. Where are they come from?
4. How long they stay on my site
5. Are they new or returning visitors?
6. Which page do they visit more?
7. What devices do they use more often?

To answer above questions, it is a must to have a tool to analyze visitors’ behavior. There are various tools available for monitoring web traffic and some are free and some are paid e.g Google Analytics, Piwik, Kissmetrics, Mint, Awstats and more. For this guide, we picked Google analytics mainly because it is free and easy to use, clean interface and most among webmaster.

The steps:

Google Analytics Setup

1. Create a Google account (Skip this, if you already have an existing account)

2. Go to https://www.google.com/analytics/

3. Access Google Analytics

4. Go to admin

5. Agree to the term of use

6. Create new tracking account

7. Copy and paste it into the code of every page you want to track.

8. To check the code is successfully inserted to every page, simply go to browser and view source code.

9. Few days later, you may see the similar statistic in your Google analytics account.

Traffic Tracking

Once integrated, Google Analytics will start tracking your traffic and you will see the data in no longer than 3 days. The data that have been generated will come in different form and you have a lot of options to track depending on the demographic target of your choice. Here are the most common ways of tracking your traffic based on the features that you can see on Google Analytics:

1. Audience Over View – This is the most common metric that you can see on your Google Analytics dashboard. It provides the summary of your traffic in a form of sessions, bounce rate, average time on site, and so on. You can refer to this metric if you want to see the summary of your traffic. This also includes the demographics, interests, geo-location, behavior, technology, mobile, custom, benchmarking, and users flow.

2. Acquisition – This is the section where you can find the traffic sources metrics. This allows you to track possible specific sources of your traffic. You can also track your PPC campaign on this section.
3. Behavior – On this section, you can see the actual flow of your visitors. It will help you to better understand where your visitors are coming, and the pages they visit the most. It can also be a good section to track the most visited pages and most ignored ones. You can also see your site speed, page timings, and speed suggestions. All are designed to make your site better.
4. Conversions – This is where goal setting and tracking occurs. You can use this section to measure the conversion rate of your landing pages. It is widely used by e-commerce sites and alike to track if their websites are converting or not.
5. Real Time – This is where you can track traffic flow in real time. Data will update continuously and each pageview is reported seconds after it occurs. This is where you can to go if you want to track the performance of a certain page as soon as you upload a content. It tracks the number of people on your site, locations, keywords they used, what pages they are viewing, and the conversions. All at real time.
6. Intelligence Events – This is the tool to use in monitoring your data closely. Google will send you alerts whenever there are changes occur on your conversions or data monitoring. You can also setup a custom alert to measure some specific data.