How To Check Ecommerce Website Traffic

Website traffic refers to the number of people visiting a website. Why is this relevant? Because it is also the basis of a website’s success.

Some people who own a website may not see the value of website data, website ranking, or overall website traffic. However, for businesses and organizations, it is important to check traffic and optimize the valuable insights gained to understand user behavior, improve online presence, and increase conversions.

If you are a business owner or a budding entrepreneur who owns a website, you’re in good hands. In this article, you will learn how to check website traffic and find traffic checker tools, traffic sources, and more that are relevant and fundamental for your business’s growth.

Introduction to Website Traffic Analysis

Learning how to check your website traffic is important to understand user behavior and measure the success of your digital marketing efforts. Your overall website performance is critical to measure, and website traffic analysis is the best way to do it.

Website traffic analysis involves collecting, analyzing, and interpreting website traffic data. By understanding the site’s traffic data, you can make better decisions to attract more visitors, convert them to customers, retain them, and ultimately increase your conversion rates.

To understand website traffic analytics, you need to familiarize yourself with these terms:

• Users: These are your site visitors who interact and take action within the site. Users can have more than one session on your site.
  
• Sessions refer to the set of interactions your users do on your site, such as e-commerce activities or page interactions, that take place in a single period.
  
• Events or Hits: These are the requests your site receives from users or visitors. They include image or button clicks, webpage loads, etc.
  
• Metrics are units of measurement in data analytics. They help you gain insights by providing quantifiable data like traffic stats, time spent on site or average visit duration, bounce rate, or number of page views.
  
• Dimensions can be used to organize, categorize, and segment your data for better analysis and detailed reports.
  
• Event parameters are the specific settings for filtering your analytics data.

To properly conduct web analytics, you will need multiple analytics tools, one of which is Google Analytics. This free website traffic checker analyzes and tracks website traffic metrics.

It also provides qualitative data aside from quantitative data. For example, you can track visitors’ flow to your website, identify which contents or pages they engaged most, and uncover the areas that need improvement in the user experience.

Using Google Analytics for Ecommerce Traffic Insights

Google Analytics is a free tool that you can leverage and add to your ecommerce traffic checker tools. This website traffic checker tool allows you to dive into specific metrics within each traffic source.

For example, you can analyze organic search traffic to see which keywords are bringing customers or visitors to your website; you can also drill into referral traffic to know the websites that are linking to yours. These functionalities enable you to pinpoint the most effective tactics for driving the most traffic and reiterate and refine your search engine optimization, SEO, and link-building efforts.

Here are also some other capabilities of Google Analytics:

• Audience analysis: You can gain valuable insights into your website visitors’ demographics like gender, age, location, and interests.
  
• Acquisition reports: Google Analytics provides detailed traffic reports about the sources of web traffic, like organic search, direct visits, social media engagements, paid ads, and referral links.
  
• Behavior analysis: With metrics like average session duration, pages per session, etc., you can analyze your audience’s behavior and identify areas for improvement.
  
• Ecommerce tracking: Google Analytics has capabilities to monitor sales performance, transactions, and revenue and profit data.
  
• Conversion tracking: An online website traffic checker like Google Analytics enables you to set up goals and track conversion rates on your online store, such as purchases, sign-ups, form submissions, etc.

Google Analytics can provide comprehensive insights, which you can leverage to overcome setbacks, refine your goals and objectives, improve your marketing effectiveness, and continuously strive to optimize your business’s digital presence.

Monitoring Clicks and Impressions with GSC

Google Search Console or GSC is another useful tool that gives insightful data into how your website appears in Google. It allows you to track clicks, impressions and other relevant data related to your website.

Based on these insights, you can see how well your website pages perform on various search queries and how effective your SEO efforts are. As a result, you can pinpoint new opportunities to improve CTR or click-through rates.

Leveraging SEO Tools for Traffic Estimation

​​Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, helps estimate traffic by analyzing keyword search fields or rankings. Putting the relevant keywords on a website’s content enables your website to rank high and gain high search volume on Google or other search engines.

Here are some of the most popular SEO tools you can use:

• Ahrefs;
• Google Search Console;
• Google Analytics;
• SEMrush.

By assessing factors like domain authority, backlink profile, and content quality of competitor sites, SEO tools can help you estimate the level of competition for specific keywords. This insight can help your business identify opportunities to use less competitive or low-ranking keywords and improve your chances of ranking higher in search engines.

You can also leverage bulk traffic analysis, which measures the rise and fall of your competitor’s traffic. This will enable you to monitor strategy changes regarding organic keyword reports, traffic value, and visibility.

Exploring Competitor’s Traffic

Exploring your competitor’s website traffic is an important part of your digital marketing strategy. By analyzing your competitor’s traffic, online presence, and performance, you can gain insights into the market trends, industry and traffic trends, audience preferences, etc.

Here are some useful insights on how to analyze the traffic of your competitors:

• Identifying top referring sites: Understanding where your competitor’s website’s traffic source can give you insights on which acquisition channels to use to generate leads and other partnership opportunities.
  
• Benchmarking performance: Analyzing your competitor’s website traffic serves as an important benchmarking exercise that can help you compare their and your website traffic metrics, like total number of visits, bounce rate, page views, etc.
  
• Analyzing user behavior: It is important to examine your competitors’ user behavior to gain insights into audience preferences, engagement levels, and content effectiveness.

By carefully studying which tactics drive traffic to your competitor websites, such as SEO, social media platforms and content marketing, you can choose which one to prioritize and optimize from this data.

Utilizing Social Media Analytics

Nowadays, most businesses have a specific platform of choice when it comes to social media. That is why if you are creating your online presence, you need to know your tools at hand, especially for driving website traffic.

Social media platforms offer data on metrics such as engagement, reach, and CTR (click-through rates). These data are valuable and can most certainly drive traffic to your website if you learn what is more important for the people.

Pinpointing these topics and trends can reach the best of your target audience, allowing the website owners to create social media content that can live through the date and drive more traffic.

Understanding Traffic Metrics

Understanding traffic metrics is essential for businesses and website owners to evaluate the performance and impact of their marketing efforts and online presence. You can gain insights into engagement levels, website performance, and user behavior by carefully analyzing key metrics like visitors, page views, and more.

Here are some of the traffic metrics you need to know:

• Page views: They represent the total number of pages web visitors view. A high number of page views means that visitors are exploring many pages and are interested.
  
• Visitors: Visitors are the people who access your website within a specific time frame only. These metrics help measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, content strategies, and overall brand awareness.
  
• Website traffic estimates: Tools like Google Analytics or SimilarWeb can help estimate the total number of visitors and page views your website receives.
  
• Traffic trend: This analysis involves understanding and examining changes in website traffic over time to see if some patterns and trends can help you mitigate risks and oversee room for opportunities.
  
• Traffic value: Traffic value means the estimated traffic that websites receive based on factors like the amount of traffic, quality of the traffic, and the potential profit or revenue that the traffic can generate.

You can also create an SEO audit of your website or ecommerce business, so you can  understand how  your site’s rank in search engine results pages (SERPs). Monitoring your site ranks helps you assess your visibility and competitiveness in organic search and improve more for your setbacks.

Using UTM Parameters to Track Campaigns

In digital marketing, UTM codes are used to locate specific website traffic sources. Using UTM parameters to track campaigns is a critical technique for businesses to measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and understand more audience behavior.

UTM parameters, also known as the Urchin Tracking Module, are used to track the effectiveness of different marketing campaigns and initiatives. You can share URLs across different platforms, such as social media and advertisements.

Also, you can precisely monitor which sources are driving traffic to your website, such as source, medium, campaign, term, and content. Different granular insights into creating and dragging website traffic allow you to easily optimize your strategies for driving audiences accordingly. 

To implement UTM, you have to be consistent and make sure you avoid confusion in your analytics tab, which should utilize tools just like Google Analytics and monitoring. Regularly reviewing these metrics can make your marketing efforts easier.

Evaluating User Behavior Through Heatmaps

Heatmaps represent user interactions on your website. You can leverage heatmaps by utilizing color gradients to show high and low engagement areas. You can use it as a visual guide and highlight the spots that capture the most attention from web visitors.

Here are some tips on evaluating user behavior using heatmaps:

• Evaluate user scroll behavior: Learn how far users scroll to your website. Identify the drop-off points or the contents where they stop and drop-off points and adjust content placement.
  
• Identify hotspots: Hotspots are areas where web visitors click the most. These areas indicate high engagement. Use the hotspots to identify critical areas of the website with lower engagement that need rework. For example, the more red the color of a specific part in your heatmap, the more visitors interact with it.
  
• Check mobile responsiveness: Check how your web visitors interact on different devices. Optimize the heatmap to know how effective your website is on a mobile device. Results can show you which content you need to reassess, such as placement. 

Tracking mouse movement is a great technique for determining how your customers or visitors interact bravely on your website.

With these insights, you can guarantee that you will be able to pinpoint the parts of your website where users engage the most and improve the parts where people are dropping.

Setting Up Goals and Conversion Tracking

Setting up goals and conversion tracking is an important aspect of digital marketing. This allows businesses like yours to measure the effectiveness of your online efforts and optimize your strategies for better results.

The goals represent the specific actions or outcomes that you want to achieve for your website, like the number of visitors making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter subscription, inquiring, etc. On the other hand, conversion tracking means tracking and analyzing the completion of the goals to understand user behavior and improve marketing efforts.

Below are some of the steps you need to have in mind when creating your goals:

• Identify what are your goals.
• Set up goals in Google Analytics.
• Assign a monetary value to your goal.
• Implement conversion tracking code.
• Test your conversion tracking setup.
• Analyze and monitor conversions.
• Optimize your marketing strategies.

Understanding user behavior and measuring your online efforts are important. That is why setting clear goals and conversion tracking can help you optimize your marketing strategies to drive sales, generate leads, or increase engagement.

Regular Monitoring and Reporting

Of course, a critical part of checking your website traffic would be regular monitoring and reporting. These are essential components that can make or break a website traffic strategy. 

First, you should be consistent in tracking key metrics for the traffic, such as the volume of users hopping into your website and the sources, like where and what they engage on to be on your website. This would allow you to gauge the effectiveness of the things you are doing on your website. 

Additionally, regular monitoring will allow you to know what content or things you did that may have caused sudden drops or fluctuations in traffic. You will then be able to address these issues that may arise.Again, all of this information will allow you to give more insights to your stakeholders, and you will be easily able to create initiatives and perform future strategies. Make sure you do these things routinely to improve your website traffic continuously.