How to monitor website traffic

When you have made a website, you will most likely be looking forward to see how many people visit your website, how much time they spend looking at your content and so forth.

Monitoring your website traffic helps to know what areas will need improvement, and can be easily analyzed using a few tools. The best ways to monitor your traffic would be to use Google Analytics and Google Search Console as a minimum.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps you follow your traffic to know where your users are coming from and what they are doing on your website. You will be able to see what pages they are visiting and the overall performance of your site.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a reporting tool which gives you insight on how Google rates your website, where are areas that you can improve on, what your best keywords are and so forth.

Google Data Studio

Both Google Analytics and Google Search Console are efficient tools when it comes to understanding how your site is doing and how well they perform. However, if you prefer dashboards, Google Data Studio is a performant way to give you a good visual report.

What should you monitor?

When you monitor your traffic, it is essential that you analyze the what you see. How well is your website actually performing? The following things are important to keep in mind to know how well you are doing: and where you may need to take some time to improve certain aspects:

Number of daily visitors
Time spent on your pages (homepage and other)
Bounce rate (the number of people that leave your website immediately)
What is your most visited page
Where do your visitors come from

Once you’ve analyzed these statistics (we recommend doing a weekly analysis), you will be able to see what pages need to be improved or if you see that the bounce rate is too high, to look at how you present your activity on your homepage.

If you want to learn how to increase your website traffic, read our guide dedicated to traffic creation