How to track website visitors?
How you will know about website optimization results if not evaluating website traffic and its quality. How many visitors do you have per month, where they come from and who they are? Bing, Yahoo, Google have their own tracking systems, but here we will talk about the most popular platform – Google.
Google has 2 main websites for website traffic analytics.
GOOGLE WEBMASTER
Google Webmaster is to track what is going on with your website right in Google. You can see how many visitors you had from Google per month or for a week or even per day. What queries do people use to find your business? It’s easy to check and control whether a website has any error that should be fixed according to Google estimation. Google Webmaster is a convenient tool to see the dynamics of website development and improvements. It shows what pages have been indexed by Google and let allow or disallows to track specific pages or website content. It helps analyze the behavior of your website only in Google. To get this data you need to link a website with this tool, by placing a code to a root directory.
1. Crawl Errors
Google webmaster tools give you information about the pages which Google is unable to crawl. This is a very important aspect because if Google cannot crawl your pages, your search engine visibility may go down.
2. Search Queries
This is information on your pages Google has returned to searchers for specific queries. The following information is available using webmaster tools.
- A total number of search queries that returned pages from your site.
- Your top search queries returned pages in Google.
- A number of times your pages were viewed in Google’s search results.
- Number of times your listings were clicked on for a particular search query.
- Percentage of times your listing was clicked for a particular search query.
- Average position of your website for a particular search query.
3. Links
- The links link to your site from other websites.
4. Blocked URLs
- If your site has the content you don’t want Google or other search engines to access, use a robots.txt file to specify how search engines should crawl your site’s content. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to find out if your robots.txt is working as expected.
5. Malware
- Google Webmaster Tools inform you If Google detects any malware on the site.
6. HTML errors
- Google Webmaster Tools inform you If Google detects any HTML errors on the site.
7. Fetch as Google
You can use Google Webmaster Tools to submit a page to Google. However, Google doesn’t guarantee that they will index every URL we crawl.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS
is one of the most popular web analytics applications. It will give you the following information.Houston see company
1. Visitor Reports
- Total number of visitors (new visitors and returned)
- The time that your visitors spend on your website.
- Amount of pages your visitors viewed.
- Bounce rate, i.e. amount of visitors who landed on your site and left immediately.
- The geographical location of your visitors
- Websites that referred visitors to your site.
2. Traffic Reports
- A total number of people visiting your site daily, monthly and yearly. Houston see company
3. Keywords
- Keywords that bring traffic to your website.
- Those Keywords produce the most sales.
- And Keywords that keep your visitors on your site for a longer duration. Houston see company
4. Website Content
- Web pages your visitors visit most often.
- Web pages that bring you more traffic.
- Pages your visitors most often leave your site.
5. Conversions: The conversion rates for the goals you set on your site. Houston see company
Google Analytics is to track visitors from any source. People may come directly to your website just by typing its name in a browser’s field or come from social media or from another website. I mean not just from a search of Google. Google Analytics has more comprehensive statistics that collect data about users’ age and sex. What pages of your website are the most popular, how long do they stay, or do they leave right after a couple of seconds. You even can track your visitor’s path, what page they entered and what pages they visited after.
So what tool to choose? Google Webmaster or Google Analytics? The answer is – BOTH! As they collect different and very useful and important data. If you know how to use the results and analyze them, you may build a strategy to improve website visibility and get more business, more money, more success. Contact BereshkaWeb for your website optimization where we can link it to all necessary Google Tools. Houston see company