Tracking website visitors is not only about measuring the number of users who visit your website – it’s also to see what they do when they’re on your site, finding out more about you.
Tracking visitors and page views are important metrics, of course. What’s much more important to see what they’re doing though!
Tracking website visitors involves understanding where they came from, what they’re on your site for, what their demographic is, and which actions they take on your website.
What’s the visitor value? How many of them see the content you want them to see? How many take the desired action you need that moves your business forward, like signing up for your newsletter? And, how long do they stay on your pages? All these are questions that you should be able to answer with website visitor tracking and analytics software.
Website visitor tracking defined
Website visitor tracking is part of web analytics. It’s about measuring and analyzing user behavior on your web pages and sales funnel pages. It’s about tracking the user source (how they found your website) and behavior (journey on your website) during the present and future visits.
Your goal with web visitor tracking should be to optimize the user experience by customizing the kind of content that visitors see on your website according to their profiles (source, country, keywords used to find your site, ad they clicked on, presumed interests).
It’s also to measure the effectiveness of your sales funnel elements; like sales copy, landing pages, blog posts and supporting pages.
Basic visitor tracking metrics
Page Views/Page Impressions: The total number of times a website (or a particular page) is visited. Knowing your top visited pages helps you understand where most of your incoming traffic lands, and track people’s actions following their entry point.
Unique Views: The number of time a website (or a particular page) is visited by unique browsers. This is different from total views because it excludes recent visitors, so they’re not counted twice.
Referrer: A third-party web property where your visitor clicked a link to your site. Looking into your referrers will help you understand which backlinks or sources bring in the most traffic.
Bounce Rate: A “bounce” is when someone visits one of your pages and immediately clicks away (clicks the back button or closes their browser tab). A bounce usually means that they didn’t find what they were looking for in your content. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who exited from the same page they landed.
Goals/Events: Pre-defined actions that visitors can take on your website, like checkout, view a product, watch a sales video, fill out a survey, submit a form, or click of a button.
Conversion Rate: Of all the web analytics and visitor behavioral metrics you might track, the conversion rate is probably the single most important one. Your conversion rate is the percentage of web visitors who completed a goal on your site. Goals are things like submitting a contact form, completing a purchase or viewing a certain page on your site.
The right tool to analyze web traffic
All of these metrics should be looked into separately and combined to derive meaningful results. Statly, our comprehensive web visitor tracking and sales funnel analysis software, produces combined reports that showcase where your visitors come from, which pages they visit and at what point they convert. So, what Statly does is derive data from all important web metrics and combine them into marketing reports of value to decision makers.
Take conversion rate, for example, which is arguably the most important metric you should track with your web visitor tracking software. Conversion rate as a whole doesn’t say much. Instead, look at the conversion rate per traffic channel.
You want to know what’s the conversion rate of a specific audience coming from a particular Facebook campaign that drives traffic to one of your landing pages. This metric, when compared to industry standards or other campaigns that you run, is the ultimate measure of how successful your site and sales funnels are.
With Statly, you can visualize your sales funnels, see what converts, and find bottlenecks that you need to fix. Maybe you’re not attracting the right kind of web visitors. Or, maybe a page has a lot of bounces, so you need to optimize it. A sudden drop in conversions might mean that there’s an error in your shopping cart.
That’s the magic of website visitor tracking and advance funnel analytics. You can easily see what works and what needs to be fixed… More than that, Statly even sends out triggered notifications when the AI-engine sees that there’s an opportunity (like a sudden burst of traffic) or a bottleneck (like a sales page that isn’t converting that well).
The wrong way to track website visitors
Now that we have explained what website visitor tracking is and how you can implement it using Statly, we also need to stress that there’s a wrong way to do it.
The wrong way is either using your hosting provider’s stats counter or installing a visitor counter on your website. Both these solutions will only give you fragments of information. With these web visitor tracking solutions you will only get the number of visits, but nothing more. No behavioral information, no funnel tracking, no conversion stats…
Track what matters
So, your only option is to use a dedicated advanced analytics solution from either the day that your site goes live or right now :0) Once you get the tracking script installed, Statly saves all the conversion data for you to dip into later.
You probably know what Google Analytics can do, and you also know that it’s the industry standard.
However, there are other web visitor tracking tools, like Statly, that are tailor-made for real businesses that want meaningful data presented in a useful way. Of course, both Statly and Google Analytics can run simultaneously on your website, if you choose to do that.
Statly is a sophisticated (yet simple and comprehensive) web analytics solution for website traffic analysis and visitor tracking. Statly enables advertising and marketing teams as well as business owners to have access to meaningful marketing data.
With Statly in your MarTech (or AdTech) stack, big data finally makes sense.
Click here to sign up for a completely free Statly account – no credit card required. Install it in less than two minutes using our WordPress plugin (or just copy and paste the code), and start tracking website visitors instantly!
