Over the past decade, investments in online marketing and websites have significantly increased. With more and more businesses entering the industry seemingly daily, business owners are starting to realize the true importance of online marketing and website traffic it is bound to bring.
Since no business can thrive without customers, business owners are constantly looking for ways to attract more attention to their business.
Good marketing will result in more website traffic, which will – in turn – bring better revenue.
But before we begin to explore all the reasons you need to try and improve your website traffic, let’s first identify the term.
What is website traffic?
Simply put, website traffic refers to all the visits made to your website. These visits are often called “sessions,” and they allow you to see just how effective your business is at attracting an audience.
Now, it’s important to mention that website traffic doesn’t necessarily mean paying customers, but it does include them as well.
What this means is that business owners need to understand that not every website visit will result in revenue. That’s why it’s also extremely important to monitor and measure your website traffic so that you can gain better insights into your overall business performance.
How to measure your website traffic?
You are already aware of the fact that your website quality is one of the key factors in its overall performance. And according to experts in web design from Miami, Website traffic can only stay for long until your website is running good and for that you must consider using the right type of web hosting service. only the highest quality websites will be able to guarantee superior performance.
But aside from making sure that your website is stellar, you will also need to learn how to measure your website traffic.
Without measurements, you simply won’t be able to determine whether or not your business website is performing the way it should.
You won’t be able to notice any areas that may be deterring your visitors instead of encouraging them to convert. In order to measure your website traffic, you should:
● Use helpful tools
Currently, there are plenty of helpful tools on the market that can assist you in measuring your website traffic.
Google Analytics is one of the best free tools you can use, but there are also paid alternatives, such as Hubspot and Kissmetrics.
These tools will provide you with an invaluable insight into how your website visitors behave on your website, how long they choose to stick around and how likely they are to convert, among other things.
● Identify your goals
You will also need to identify the goals you’re trying to reach with your website in order to be able to determine whether or not it’s helping you reach them.
Simply put, there won’t be much point in measuring if you don’t know what you’re measuring. For most businesses, the ultimate goal is increased revenue, but you will also need to measure all the steps that resulted in it.
● Know your KPIs
By identifying your key performance indicators, you’ll be able to determine whether or not your website is performing the way you want it to.
Reports from various analytic tools may sometimes be quite confusing. But if your goal is to generate more leads, you will need to identify your KPIs that help you reach those goals.
● Other factors to consider
Aside from these, there are other factors to consider, such as:
⮚ Visitors
The total number of people that visit your website. You want this number to be high.
⮚ Unique visitors
The number of people who have visited your website more than a couple of times.
⮚ Page views
The number of times a specific page was viewed.
⮚ Page visits
The number of pages that were visited during a single session.
⮚ Traffic sources
Information about where your visits are coming from.
⮚ Bounce rates
The number of visitors that abandoned your website after viewing only one page. Always aim at the lowest possible bounce rate!
⮚ Landing pages
The pages with the highest number of visits will arguably be the most relevant to your visitors’ search queries.
Key reasons why website traffic is important
Now that we’ve defined website traffic and brought more light to all the ways in which you can measure it, it’s time to discuss five key reasons why website traffic actually matters.
1. Allows you to monitor conversion rates
As mentioned earlier, every business’s end goal is to increase its revenue. However, without encouraging your website visitors to convert to paying customers, you won’t really be able to reach this goal.
According to a website design company from San Diego, having a high-quality website is only a piece of the puzzle that will help you reach this goal. You will also need to stay on top of your conversion rates and see if there’s any room or need for improvements.
2. Tells you where your leads are coming from
Aside from knowing how many of your website visitors actually convert to customers, you will also want to know where those visitors are coming from.
This will enable you to determine which of your marketing efforts bring in the most visitors, as well as how many of those visitors from specific channels actually end up converting.
● Paid traffic
Paid traffic includes any traffic that you’ve actually had to pay for, such as Google Ads and Social Ads.
● Organic searches and SEO
Organic traffic is all the traffic that comes to your website through organic searches and SEO.
● Referrals
Traffic that your website experienced thanks to various referrals, as well as your content marketing.
● Social media
All visits to your website that were a direct result of your non-paid-for social media presence.
3. Enables you to see who is visiting your website
It’s worth mentioning that not all of your website visits come from genuine human accounts.
It can sometimes happen that a large portion of your website traffic actually comes from bot accounts. And while this is great if you only consider how much traffic your website is receiving, it won’t really do much – if anything – for your revenue.
That’s why you need to determine the number of your website visits that come from real people in order to be able to gauge how many conversions – and revenue – you can realistically expect to gain.
4. It will result in conversions
A percentage of your website visits will result in conversions. But businesses can sometimes struggle to identify the exact correlation between the size of the traffic and the number of conversions.
Ideally, you should try to gather as much data as you possibly can regarding the number of your website visits, where they come from and how many of them end up converting to paying customers.
It’s of the utmost importance that you ensure that your traffic converts. Otherwise, you can’t really expect a positive revenue.
5. Informs you about the effectiveness of your marketing efforts
Finally, analyzing your website traffic will inform you about the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
By analyzing which of your marketing channels bring in the most traffic and which portion of that traffic actually ends up converting, you’ll be able to determine your best-performing marketing strategies.
This will be extremely important for your business’s overall marketing ROI (return on investment), as pumping resources into something that simply doesn’t bring a positive ROI back doesn’t make any sense.
To sum up
With all that being said, it becomes quite clear why any business should aim at gaining a better understanding of their website traffic.
Sure, having lots of web traffic is great, but unless a great portion of that traffic is bringing in revenue, you can’t really expect your business to thrive.
Ellie Northcott is a long-time marketer, currently working as a freelancer in Miami, Florida.
Editor at Digital Strategy One.
She is also a passionate writer and loves to explore new, innovative and digital news.
In her spare time, she is an eco-activist.
