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One of the greatest ways to gauge the success of your marketing and advertising efforts is to utilize a free service like Google Analytics to track the number of visitors your website receives. A tracking code is all you need to get started.

What Exactly Does Google Analytics Mean by "Website Traffic"?

The following three metrics in Google Analytics may be used to gauge website traffic:

1. Pageviews
2. Sessions
3. Users

What do you mean by "pageviews"?

The term "pageview" describes the process by which a person accesses and sees a web page in their browser. The total number of pageviews for a single visit would be four if a visitor went to a blog post, two service pages, and finally the contact page.

What do you mean by the term "sessions"?

Google Analytics keeps track of "sessions" whenever someone visits your site. Users' sessions begin with the "Landing Page" and terminate with the "Exit Page," which is the last page they view before leaving or becoming inactive. Because a single session might comprise numerous pageviews, the total number of pageviews on your site will always be higher than the total number of sessions.

Exactly who or what do you mean by the term "users"?

Unique visits are referred to by Google Analytics as "users." New visitors to your site are given a unique ID that may be used to monitor their repeat visits. A user who visits your website three times will be linked to the same person in Google Analytics. As a result, your site will see more sessions than users, even if the number of users is constant.

What Is the Best Metric to Monitor for Traffic?

When it comes to website traffic, you need to know which indicators are the most important to monitor. Each of the metrics listed above may provide significant information about the number of visitors to your site and the pages they visit most often. Depending on your company's aims and your SEO objectives, you may want to keep track of pageviews, sessions, or users. Each one measures something somewhat different, but they all tend to follow similar trends.

Tracking each of these three metrics may be done by a variety of different methods of traffic. Now that we know the various forms of online traffic, how they vary, and which ones are most relevant to SEO, let's take a closer look.

Defining the Different Types of Internet Traffic

Google Analytics categorizes visitors to a website by "sources" or "channels," respectively. "How are visitors discovering my website?" is one of the most essential questions in digital marketing. Organic search traffic is the only one that directly pertains to SEO, but understanding the other three is critical for a variety of reasons.

Defintion of Traffic Sources

Search Engines are the source.

Search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo refer to this traffic as "organic search." One of the most important performance indicators for SEO is organic search traffic, which monitors the number of unpaid hits your site gets from search engine result pages (SERPs).

Traffic that is referred to you

Referral traffic is a metric in Google Analytics that tracks the number of people that arrive at your website through links from other sites. Strong referral traffic may be a sign of how Google views your website's legitimacy since a "referral" is a suggestion from another site. An increase in referral traffic may have a direct effect on your search engine position. Backlinks, or connections that point to your site from other websites, are a vital part of any SEO strategy.

Transportation in a Straight Line

Visitors who type in your URL or click a stored bookmark to go to your site are considered direct traffic by Google Analytics. This is a catch-all category for traffic that Google Analytics cannot identify, so keep this in mind. (You may learn more about direct traffic in Google Analytics by clicking here).

Social Networking

Your site's social traffic originates from social networks or social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. When a user clicks on a social media post to visit your website, Google Analytics will count it as social traffic. This is technically referral traffic, but since Google recognizes the unique role played by social media in marketing and advertising, it breaks it off.

Measuring Web Traffic Can Teach You a Lot About SEO.

A Look at Organic Traffic Data

Because SEO strategies aim to increase your website's organic traffic, tracking how many visitors come from search engines is an important part of the process. On the other hand, there are other sorts of SERP results, and I want to draw a short differentiation.

What's the Difference Between Organic and Paid Search?

They may share a neighborhood, but organic and sponsored search are completely distinct beasts. This search for "top SEO firms" yields results from both paid and unpaid sources. Ads for paid search come first, followed by organic results. There are a few key differences between the two.

Why are organic search results more trustworthy than sponsored search results since they are earned?

• Organic search results are free. Your SEO-optimized content generates a steady stream of organic traffic thanks to its high quality and trustworthiness.
• When you cease paying for Google Ads, paid search stops generating clicks.
• Other than that, organic search traffic is more likely to provide you with quality leads since keyword research is done to draw in individuals who are interested in what you have to offer. Organic search traffic

Why Track Organic Traffic?

SEO is useless unless you're attracting organic traffic to your site, which is the only thing that counts. One of the biggest signs of SEO success is the increase in organic traffic over time. Your SEO performance is improving if you see a significant increase in the number of visits to your site from search engines over time.

Monitoring organic traffic using Google Analytics

If you don't know where to find organic traffic stats, go to your Google Analytics dashboard. We'll show you how.

Go to Acquisition > Overview and you'll get a list of all the various sources of visitors that are coming to your website.

Detailed information on your organic traffic may be accessed by clicking the blue "organic search" link. A somewhat pointless report that breaks down your organic traffic into specific keywords is the first thing you'll notice when you log in. Because of privacy concerns, Google Analytics doesn't give excellent keyword-level data.

You just need page-level data, thank goodness, so click on Landing Page for additional insightful information. Using this table, you can see how much organic traffic each of your pages is getting.

What Do Landing Pages Teach Us?

You can see in the sample below how many blog entries on the Victorious site had the most views.

This is where I ended up after searching for our blog directory name in the Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages section and filtering for organic traffic.

In the default order, landing pages are ranked according to the number of sessions they've had. You can use this view to check which techniques are working and which need to be re-evaluated in order to perform better. You can also use this view to check where visitors spend the most time on your website.

"Sessions" is the sole actual traffic measure mentioned under "Acquisition," from which "Percent New Sessions" and "New Users" are generated.

Everything included under "behavior" pertains to a person's level of involvement in the conversation. In a separate piece, I'll go through what you can discover about your content by analyzing engagement numbers.

Conversion percentages are based on how well your pages are turning visitors into leads and, finally, customers. But don't worry, I'll go into more detail in a future piece.

One reason, though, is that I'd want you to take a brief look at your conversion numbers in relation to organic visitors.

Analyze the conversion rates of your most popular pages to see how well they're doing. Your biggest chance to drive customers down your marketing funnel and improve your sales may be sitting on those highly frequented sites that aren't converting. To get the most out of that traffic, consider doing a conversion study. With that said, sorting by conversion rate will reveal your most converted pages, which will help you optimize them for search so you can attract more visitors.

Using the arrow in the sessions column, you may reverse the order of your pages and identify which ones need to be reworked or perhaps culled entirely.

Recognizing Traffic From Referral Sources

If you want to see how many visitors came to your site from other sources than search engines, social networks, or email, Google uses referral traffic. GA normally records a referral visit as a person arriving at your site through a link on one of these other sites.

Why Is Referral Traffic So Important?

Referral traffic is significant because it brings users to your site who may be more likely to be interested in your products or services. These backlinks are a way to put your material in front of a larger audience than would be possible via organic search. Referral traffic from a reputable website is more likely to trust your material because of the context provided by the backlinks, just as you may be more inclined to visit a new restaurant after hearing about it from a friend.

Referral Traffic's SEO Advantages

Referral traffic via backlinks is seen by Google as an indication of social proof, which improves the authority and trustworthiness of your site and hence improves your search rating.

Backlinks have their downsides.

Low-quality links might have the opposite effect on your search score as links from reliable sites. It's much more important to monitor your referral traffic. Make an effort to learn more about what constitutes a high-quality link.

Why Track Referral Traffic?

Examining your referral traffic might provide valuable information. There are several ways to learn about users' interests and behaviors by looking at where your referral traffic comes from.

Skateboarders, for example, are likely to be interested in the insoles you offer if you're receiving high levels of referral traffic from a skate shoe maker.

If you learn anything like this, you may want to rethink your SEO approach and focus on creating content that specifically targets that group.

You may also use the context of referring sites to study visitors to your pages in order to improve conversion pages for certain demographics that will move them through your marketing funnel and influence your revenue targets.

Referral Traffic using Google Analytics

Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals in your GA dashboard.

Session volume is used to rank this list of sites that have sent traffic to yours. If you want to know the quality of your referral traffic, you'll need to look at more than just the quantity of visits. What sites, for example, have the longest sessions on average? Are certain visitors more likely to convert than others?

Use everything you've learned here to figure out where your most engaged (and lucrative) referral traffic is coming from, devise a strategy for increasing those referrals, and identify comparable sites to link to. Your SEO approach might be tweaked to target a new population that you hadn't previously considered as a potential customer.

What's the Connection Between SEO and Direct Traffic?

Direct traffic seems to be made up of folks who know precisely where they're going and aren't wasting time getting lost. Users who input your URL into their browser or bookmark your site are considered direct traffic by Google Analytics.

When there isn't enough information about how a visitor got to your website, Google Analytics will label the traffic source as "direct." When GA doesn't know how to attribute a session, it uses this form of misattribution to divert traffic as a fallback alternative. These sessions may be better referred to as "unknown traffic."

Because of this, SEO agencies may consider data from the direct traffic channel of little relevance in the context of search optimization. There is no direct correlation between your SEO strategy and these figures, but understanding what causes the misattribution of non-direct traffic to be attributed to the direct channel is important so that the remainder of your traffic metrics are correct.

Recommendations for further study

• Google Analytics' best practices for reducing direct traffic
• Starting off with Google Analytics is covered in this guide.
• Google Analytics: How to Add a User

frequently asked web traffic measurement questions

In Google Analytics, how long does it typically take for new data to appear?

Google Analytics might take up to 24 hours to display new data. GA, on the other hand, begins collecting data as soon as you add the tracking id to your site. You can't get traffic data from before Google Analytics was implemented since there is no method to do so.

If you've set up your tracking ID and haven't seen any data after a few days, check to see if there are any issues with the implementation.

Installing the Google Tag Assistant Chrome extension is an easy way to ensure that your code is correctly implemented. Your site's tracking ID and status will be shown here.

What are my website's most popular pages?

Click on Behavior > Site Content > All Pages in Google Analytics to see the most popular pages on your site. The most popular pages appear at the top of the list by default.

At what intervals should I take traffic measurements for my website?

Because traffic measurements are subject to erratic swings, I suggest monitoring them on a weekly basis. If you're looking for an early sign of how well your marketing effort is doing, traffic stats are a fantastic place to start. Every week, keep a check on MoM or YoY comparisons to see if there are any mysterious peaks or troughs, and keep an eye out for seasonality or patterns either way.

How does my website's traffic affect my company's sales?

More traffic to your website often means that you have more opportunities to create leads, nurture customers, and close sales. Getting visitors to visit your website is the first step in creating a successful online company, even though the number of sessions is not a perfect predictor of business success.

How can I get more people to recommend me?

For example, there are a few simple things you can do to increase your referral traffic.

Use industry directories to promote your firm.

• Become a review site reviewer.
• Write a guest post on other blogs.
• Maximize your presence on social media platforms.

On the other hand, SEO link building services are the most efficient way to increase your referral traffic.

My traffic is increasing, yet my conversions are decreasing. What if this is the case?

Instead of drawing in potential clients, you're only attracting searches. As a result, you'll need the support of a keyword research firm to identify and target relevant search terms.

The referral traffic instead of the social traffic comes from Facebook click-throughs, so I'm wondering why that is.

Referral traffic from Facebook is counted by Google Analytics when a user clicks on a link on Facebook. Because of this, you may notice referral sources like the following:

• m.facebook.com
• www.facebook.com
• facebook.com
• lm.facebook.com

Using a filter in Google Analytics, you may merge all of the various Facebook referral sources into a single source. Click here to find out more information.

In a Nutshell: How to Track Web Traffic

Getting to know your SEO agency's results is only possible with a solid grasp of how to track and monitor website traffic. Depending on your business's specific SEO objectives, the manner in which you assess your website traffic may change over time.

Strategic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Collaboration

You don't have to accomplish everything on your own after you've learned more about SEO. At Victorious, we've found that the best customer relationships are built on open and honest communication about what's working and what isn't, as well as how best to use campaign resources to get the most return on your investment.