How to Use Tools to Analyze Website Traffic

Author: Alexa Rose Spear Category: Marketing, Social Media & Digital Date: October 19, 2022

Your website is probably one of, if not the, most important tool in your arsenal for marketing and operating your business. You also probably invested a significant amount of money, time, and resources on your stie. But how do you know if your website is functioning properly and grabbing the data you need to drive your business?  Website analytics. And lucky for you, there are lot of tools to analyze websites available to help you test and monitor not only the health of your site, but your competitors as well. But what are they, which is the best analytics tool for websites, and what do you want to track? Let’s dig in.

What is Website Traffic Analysis?

Like your local TV or radio station keeps you up to date on the trouble spots you will encounter on your commute, website or internet traffic analysis tools help you track and evaluate who is coming to your site, how they are getting there, and what they are doing once they are there, among other things. You can then use that information provided by the tools to analyze your website to make strategic decisions on how you run your website and business. Web analytics tools in digital marketing can also help you analyze how your competitors are doing, so you can compare it to your own metrics.

What to Look For When Using Tools to Analyze Websites

How do you analyze a website? When using tools to analyze your website, here are some of the key factors to monitor:

• Demographics: With the right tools to analyze your website, you can learn a lot about your audience – age, location, gender, interests, and what language they speak.
• Visits: The number of visits to your site, new or returning.
• Unique visitors: The number of people who visited a website at least once over a given time, or new visitors. It’s important to understand that quality is more important than quantity.
• Traffic sources: How are people finding you? Search engines? Social media? Email links?
• Organic search traffic: The number of visitors who found your site through a search engine.
• SEO: What are the top search keywords people are using to find you?
• Pageviews: How many pages does a visitor review on your website within a given period?
• Average visit duration: How long does the average user spend on your site?
• Bounce rate: How many visitors leave without looking at a second page on your website?
• Exit pages: At what point and on which page do people decide to leave your site?
• Conversion rate: How often do users do what you want them to do, or convert (buy something, schedule a consultation, sign up for your email list, etc.) during their visit?
• Site speed: Even a two-second site-loading delay can cost you site visitors.

Traffic Analysis Tools

There are many different tools to analyze your website available. Here are some of the most popular tools used to analyze:

• HubSpot CMS
• Mouseflow
• SimilarWeb
• Semrush
• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console
• Ubersuggest
• Serpstat
• Ahrefs
• MonsterInsights
• Sitechecker Pro
• SERanking
• WebCEO

When you are doing a web analytics tools comparison, each of these tools to analyze your website comes with different features and price points, and some have free options. You will probably want to utilize a combination of a few or several to ensure you have robust data to analyze.

Putting Your Tools to Work

Once you have enlisted tools to analyze your website, you want to put all that helpful information to work by using it to improve your site. This includes:

• Boosting your top pages. Search engine optimize those pages, incorporate critical calls to action, and share them in your outreach channels.
• Focusing on the channels that work best. You don’t have to be successful on all your channels to still be successful. If one channel doesn’t seem to be working for you, it’s OK to spend less time pursuing it. Maybe it’s just not where your audience likes to be.
• Creating monthly analytics reports and making updates as needed.
• Keeping track of trends over time.

Simply put, do less of what doesn’t work, and do more of what does. And if something you really need to work isn’t working, use the data to inform your adjustments – in everything from your sales process and marketing to your recruiting and daily operations.

Your website metrics offer a wealth of information about your site’s visitors and the effectiveness of your strategy. To continuously improve your marketing campaigns and tactics, it is crucial to regularly monitor your efforts and understand how to analyze the resulting data. At Paradigm, we can guide you in finding the metrics that matter most to your business, and help you adjust your marketing strategies to improve campaign performance. No matter where you are in your marketing process, we can help you get the most out of your tools to analyze your website and your website data. Contact us today to get started.