How to Monitor Your Traffic and Why Do It

Do you monitor your traffic? Do you know where it is coming from and what converts? These are crucial to achieving success online.

How to Monitor Your Traffic

Monitoring your traffic needn’t be difficult or expensive. In fact, one of the easiest tools for monitoring traffic is completely free – Google Analytics. This allows you to get information regarding where your traffic is coming from, what keywords people are using to find your website, as well as being able to connect to your Adwords campaigns and track various other information.

Another good, free traffic monitoring tool is PhpMyVisites which is an open source script that can be uploaded to your website and provides information in an easy-to-read format.

What you should be tracking

So what information should you be looking at when you monitor your traffic? The first is how many visitors you are receiving and where they come from in terms of the different marketing tools you are using and search engines you are listed on. This shows you where you should be spending more marketing time and perhaps some advertising tools that are not effective for your website.

Also consider how many bounces you are getting – how many people see the first page of your website and move on? How many people stay to view different pages of your website? If people are bouncing away from your website a lot then it may mean that you need to take another look at your website design or content to see how you can make them stay longer. After all, visitors who bounce from a website are not likely to be purchasing anything.

Split Testing – What Works?

Another form of monitoring traffic and your website is called split testing and is used to determine the effectiveness of similar ad copies or web pages. This testing will show you how to make small changes to your sales copy or ad copy so that more people will purchase your products or services.

In split testing you create two web pages or two adverts that are virtually identical except for one small difference that you are testing for. You then put these ads out on the relevant websites or send traffic to the two relevant pages and see which ones brings the best results. You can then use the one that works and make another small change to try and perfect your ad or sales copy.

Monitoring your traffic is essential if you want to improve the traffic you receive – both in the quantity as well as ensuring that people don’t just leave your website before taking any action. There are many free tools out there that you can use to monitor website traffic and test what is working for you – two of these are Google Analytics and PhpMyVisites.