Website traffic is nothing but the number of visits your website gets from the people who visit your website. In simple words, it is the number of visitors that enter your website and take action. Besides this, there are plenty of factors affecting the performance of a business website.
Without proper knowledge of understanding these metrics, you can’t make sense out of website traffic and utilize them accordingly for better results. So here we will explain to you every factor in detail so that you can make the best use out of them while working on improving your website’s performance:
How to Track Website Traffic
Visits
Visits refer to the number of people entering your website directly or indirectly through various ways like social media, search engines, etc.
New Visits
The number of visits resulting in the first visit to your website in the given period.
Bounce Rate
It is nothing but the percentage of website traffic visitors who do not proceed further than one page on your website. Generally, it implies that there is no relevant information available for them on your website. This metric has both positive and negative effects on your business. Because If you have announced a discount offer, then people may not intend to go ahead instead.
People will click back or close the site since they got what they want. On the other hand, if you have announced some great news related to a product/service before, then normally the bounce rate should be low because users click through different pages after landing up at one place where they get all the required information about the product/service.
Average Page Views
It is nothing but the average number of pages each visitor views on your website. If you see, high website traffic sites like YouTube, Facebook, etc., have an 84% bounce rate while having 1 billion+ visits per day because their visitors are satisfied after viewing one page only. So the avg. page views will be 1 for them, i.e., 1/1 = 1
This shows that they have to keep updating content very frequently so that users do not get bored and visit other places searching for their required products or services. This metric can also affect your business positively if it remains low because this implies that there are no unnecessary pages added to your site, which may confuse users.
Average Visit Duration
It is nothing but the average time users spend on your website traffic in seconds. This metric differs for different websites because each has its own target visitors with its own nature of behavior example, a. A certain percentage of people may leave quickly after entering your website, while others may stay for hours. To understand the avg visit duration, you have to watch this metric over a period and then analyze and draw conclusions accordingly.
For example, You can observe that there is a huge difference between the average visit durations of YouTube and Facebook, which shows that people spend much longer time on YouTube than on Facebook – 1 minute 40 seconds vs. 2 minutes 12 seconds respectively, as per Alexa’s ranking (as shown in the graph).
So you can conclude that people use Facebook for entertainment purposes while YouTube is a place to watch informative videos.
Average Order Value
This is nothing but the average amount of money spent by each of your visitors on your website, i.e., total orders divided by a total number of visitors. This factor highly depends on traffic because if your business site’s traffic is more, it will result in more order value and vice versa. There are some other factors also affecting avg. For example, order values such as discounts offered, etc., on offer at different times may encourage users to make online purchases through their mobile devices on your website, which ultimately results in a high average order value.
Geo Location
This refers to the geographical location from where traffic is coming to your website. It is good for business owners because they can find out the traffic source and work on it, if possible. For example, if your site comes in the top five results in a search query, then the chances are high that visitors from different countries will land up at your website. So, knowing this location helps you to decide whether you need localization of your website or not?
Mobile Traffic
It’s nothing but the percentage of total traffic generated by mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. By understanding this metric, you may understand whether users like using websites rendered by their mobile devices or not, which eventually helps in deciding web designing elements for future projects, e.g., check forms, etc.
Social Traffic
It is nothing but the percentage of total traffic generated from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Takeaway
You can achieve all the above factors by using web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, WebTrends, etc. In fact, you can find out various other parameters if you have a good knowledge of your industry and its requirements.
To have a complete understanding of your business site’s traffic flow, you need to keep checking these metrics regularly and the keywords people are searching for to reach your website. This way, you will be able to determine whether users like your products/services or not and how much time they are spending on your website when they come across it through search engines – both positive & negative points which are important for making marketing decisions in future.