Are you looking for the answer on how to check website traffic free? Or you are wondering how to check website traffic using Google Analytics or any other tools.
Checking and teaching traffic is important as it tells you where your traffic mostly comes from. Whether it is from social media, Google searches, or any other sources. Traffic checking tools help you to analyze your traffic and make strategies to further grow traffic on your website.
In this article, I will discuss different ways you can use to check and track website traffic.
Let’s start.
Why Is Checking And Tracking Websites Traffic Important?
If you are a website owner and running an online business or a marketer, you definitely know traffic is the money. And you have to analyze the traffic to make your online business successful.
Without traffic, your website won’t be able to attract new visitors, generate leads, or make sales. So checking and tracking website traffic helps you,
1. Finding And Understanding Your Target Audience:
When you track the visitor, you will know their geographic location and through which channel they come to your website. So in this way, you will make a strong presence in that channel.
Furthermore, you will have a better understanding of audience behavior and their engagement with your website. So you can bring further improvement to your website performance.
2. Finding The Best Channel:
When you track the audience, you will know which social media channel has your stronger presence and is performing better compared to the other platforms.
You can focus more on this platform to make further better results.
3. Identifying The Low-Performing Platform:
If you are getting good traffic from different platforms but on one platform, your presence is not strong and does not attract visitors. You can focus on it more and find the loose ends.
4. Analyze Content Performance:
Different channel visitors have a particular interest in certain topics that you can discover by checking the website traffic. Create new content according to the visitors’ interest and again analyze the audience engagement and bounce rate.
In this way, you know which content is performing well and create new content according to the audience’s interest.
How To Check Website Traffic For Free In 2023
Here are some easy methods that will help you to freely track your website traffic in 2023 and 2024:
Check Website Traffic On WordPress Using Free Plugins:
If you want to add a plugin that gives you an insight into the website traffic and its performance, it’s also a good idea.
Some plugins offer easy to use free too. And you do not need to worry even if you don’t have coding skills. These tools help you to grow your email list, manage your contact lists, and send marketing emails to your audience directly from the WordPress website.
Their inbuilt analytics track the website performance and analyze which channels are leading more traffic to your website. In this way, you get the idea and focus more on those channels to increase traffic.
You will get all the necessary data information like the audience, their behavior, and engagement with the website content and your website content performance.
With analytics tools, you can easily manage your website contacts. Also, track how these contacts interact with your website and use this data to create marketing campaigns according to the audience’s interest and behavior.
Google Site Kit:
Site Kit is a plugin of Google for WordPress websites that track and analyze user activities. Moreover, it also integrates Google Analytics with Wordpress.
Google Site Kit dashboard provides all the necessary data, and you can check the website traffic on WordPress. You don’t need to leave the WordPress site for this.
You can incorporate Google Search Console for SEO improvement Google Adsense for advertisements and Page Speed insight for checking page performance into Site Kit.
2. Check Website Traffic Using Google Analytics:
Google Analytics is the most amazing and advanced website traffic checker software. Although setting up Google Analytics requires some code snippet editing. That requires utmost attention because the slightest mistake can mess up your website tracking data.
If you do not have any coding skills, then the best way is to use the Google Analytics plugin for wordpress.
Use Google Analytics 4 (GA4):
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) uses traffic acquisitions which give you insights into how users are finding and accessing your website.
The overview section provides a high-level summary of your website’s traffic sources, including the percentage of traffic from each source and key metrics such as sessions, bounce rate, and average session duration.
Average session duration is a metric that measures the user’s time duration that he spends on your website under a single session.
These data show user activities in the last 28 days. Like the underlying image, you can see the users’ performance on a website.
Track Visitors Channels:
If you want to check the website traffic using Google Analytics then,
- Log in to your Google Analytics Account
- If you use Universal Analytics, then Go to Acquisition Then All Traffic then Channels
- If you use Google Analytics 4 (GA4), go to Acquisition >> Traffic Acquisition.
In this Google analytic report, you can check from which channels visitors mostly are coming.
Like, As you can see in the above images, the most traffic is coming from Organic searches. Organic search is the web pages that appear on the search engine result page in response to the user search questions and queries.
These people mostly come from search engines like Google, Yahoo, Binge, etc.
Check Traffic Source For Particular Website Page:
- Go to the Google Analytics dashboard
- Find the Behaviour option then Site content
Here you can check the traffic on all pages of the website as well as landing pages, and exit pages of the website.
And for Google Analytics 4 GA4:
- Click on the Engagement
- Then Click on the Pages and Screens option
Now you can check and analyze views as well as users. You will get the idea of which page gets the highest views and how many users view those pages entirely.
In this way, you have an idea of which page is performing well and which content is getting greater attention and engagement.
Demographic Overview:
You can also check the audience demographics and their location. You will get an idea of which countries your website gets the highest traffic. As in this report, the most traffic comes from the United States, and users are more than ten thousand.
You will get more ideas about what is the audience’s interest according to their demographic locations.
You can check the last 28 days’ report. Moreover, you can add the date range in a report.
For this,
- Click on the date range located at the top right corner of the screen
- Select the data range from the last 7 days to the last 12 months
- Click on the apply
Check the Device Category:
You will also check how many users are using which device to visit your website.
As in this report, most users use desktops as compared to mobile phones or tablets.
How To Interpret the Website Traffic Data?
After collecting data, you have to understand the data which will be helpful to analyze the website performance.
The purpose of web traffic analytics is to measure the users’ behaviors and improve the user experience that helps to meet your goals which can be boosting conversions or sales.
As you will find overwhelming data on analytics but understanding the necessary one is the key as a beginner.
Importance Of These Web Data:
These web data tell you how your website is performing, like in the above example the website traffic is mostly from the desktop. You will focus more on it to make it more mobile-friendly and find other loose ends.
There are a few web Analytics that you have to know for checking website traffic.
Find Traffic Source:
These data tell How visitors come to your website. In this way, you will know how audiences from all over the world are coming to your website.
This reporting tool is Called Source and Source Medium in Google Analytics will give you all information on which channels people mostly use to land on your website.
There are different traffic sources like
- Organic search
- Referrals
- Organic Social
- Email Marketing
- Paid Search
- Paid Social
- Direct traffic
Your main focus should be organic search, as the traffic that comes from these are mostly unpaid search results in search engines. Improving these sources will automatically help you improve other channels as well.
Pageviews:
A page view is a count of the number of pages that were viewed during a session. In other words how many times visitors have viewed your website page?
When the browser loads your page, it will count as a 1-page view.
If he reloads the page it will count as 2 views.
If that user loads one page, then goes to the second page on your website, and again returns to the old page, it will be counted as the 3 views.
In short, Each time a page is loaded or reloaded in a browser, it is counted as a new pageview.
This metric can help you understand which pages on your website are the most popular and which ones may need improvement.
Visits:
This metric is different from the page views. In visit metrics how many times a person has visited your website under a specified period. These visitors can be new or returning visitors.
In the visit metric both these metrics are grouped together and provide the final total count of visits.
For example, if a user visits your website for the first time on Monday and then returns on Friday, that would count as two visits. If that same user returns again the next Monday, it would count as three visits.
Visits tell you the frequency of the user’s visits to your website.
New Visits:
A new visitor is also called a new user, new visitor sessions, and Unique visitor. As These terminologies indicate they are those who come for the first time to your website. They can return again to your website, but their first visit to your website is called unique.
Analyzing unique visits can help you understand the effectiveness of your website in attracting new potential leads. If you have a high number of unique visits, it indicates that your website is doing a good job of attracting new visitors and generating interest in your business.
This metric tells you how much your website is getting online visibility and exposure.
Sessions:
A time duration that starts from visitors first landing on the website and ends when users leave the website. A session contains visitors’ interaction with your website page views, Call Action clicks, and events within a given time duration.
The time duration of a session varies according to the enemy and its tools. The duration of the session in Google Analytics is 30 minutes. Even if a user leaves the website and returns within 30 minutes it will still count as 1 session.
However, if the user remains active on your website for more than 30 minutes without taking a break, this will still be counted as a single session, even if they perform multiple actions, such as clicking on a CTA button.
If they remain inactive and do not leave your website for 30 minutes or more and take a certain action, then it will count as 2 sessions.
Bounce Rate:
Bounce rate is the most important metric that tells visitors’ interest in your website. If they visit the website and immediately leave the website after viewing the page without performing any action, like interacting with other pages on the website, then it means the bounce rate is very high.
A high bounce rate means visitors are not getting from your page what they are looking for.
With the help of the bounce rate, you can analyze the content and user behavior. You can bring improvement to the content that is getting a high bounce rate.
Sometimes a high bounce rate does not mean that your content is not good or relevant enough. Some users land on the website and get the answer immediately, and if they don’t feel the need to look for the other pages, then it doesn’t mean your content is not performing well.
The average bounce rate is between 26% to 70%. If your website bounce rate is between 30-50 then your bounce rate is good. More than 70% is considered a very high bounce rate.
Set Your Goals:
There is so much overwhelming traffic-checking data that you might get confused about which should be your main focus. Setting goals for the website is a wise step to focus on the main data to check website traffic performance.
Let’s say your website is running an online store, and your goal is to increase sales and track conversion rates. Many visitors visit your website and purchase something.
With the help of these metrics, bring further improvement to your website like, improving user experience. You can analyze the changes whether these changes bring any positive changes in your conversion rates or not.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):
How To Check The Website Traffic Of Other Websites?
If you want to know your competitors’ traffic on their websites then there are a few tools that can be helpful. Moreover, they give free as well but you can perform limited checking per day on them.
Go to their website and paste the URL of the competitor’s websites. You will get insight into the website traffic as well as their ranking keywords and position in the SERP.
Can You See Who Visited Your Website?
No, you cannot recognize a particular person. Google Analytics gives you whole collective data about website traffic.
Do I Get Paid If Users Visit My Website?
Yeah, if you run advertising via Google Adsense on your website, and when users click on that ad, you will get paid a particular amount.
Why Use Google Analytics?
If you own the website, then you should have Google Analytics because it will give you an idea of how your website is performing.
Does Google Analytics Track IP?
Yes, Google Analytics tracks the IP (Internet Protocol) address of website visitors. This information is used to determine the geographic location of the visitor and to identify visitor behavior.
However, under the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) website owners must have consent from their visitors before collecting their personal data.
Final Thoughts:
In this article, I discussed the basic way that you can use to check website traffic. But you have a better understanding of terminologies to read web analytics effectively.
Set goals for your website and then focus on main analytics like the number of unique visitors, bounce rate, or how much visitors are spending time on your webpage.
Check these analytics regularly and bring improvements. Because your online business only grows when you know your audience’s interest and behavior.
So look at what works best for your audience and what does not and take your website to a professional level.
I will be happy if you find this article helpful.
