A Guide to Check Website Traffic Google Reports and Interpret the Metrics
When you’re a website owner, it’s important for you to stay on top of your site’s performance and check website traffic Google reports regularly. If you haven’t been checking your website analytics reports, you are missing out on a ton of opportunities to drive even more traffic to your website and attract quality leads.
Strikingly has a built in website analytics tool that lets you check site traffic and get a good overview of where your audience is coming from. If you want to see website traffic reports in much granular detail, however, you will need Google Analytics for that.
Because of the wealth of data that you can find in Google Analytics, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the volume of information it provides. Here’s a good guide on website traffic checking using this tool.
Audience analysis
One good tip on how to see website traffic is by looking at the type of people who come into your website. The Audience reports tell you the number of people who have visited your site within a certain time period and how many have visited but have not yet purchased from or engaged your business.
With the Audience report, you get a more granular view of your traffic’s demographics, behavior, interests and location among others. Start with the Overview section under Audience to get a general look at the data on this section. If you’re running a digital marketing campaign currently, go to Active Users to view website traffic report that shows the number of people coming into your website during a given period. Compare the numbers for 1-day, 7-day and 30-day periods to measure audience interest. If you see the numbers drastically decreasing, there is a high chance that your message is failing to resonate well with your visitors.
Demographics, Interests, and Behavior are three reports that are great for audience targeting and market segmentation. Demographics shows the gender and age of your users and gives you opportunities for tailoring your paid ads or social media messages to suit your site traffic. Interests offer great data for remarketing campaigns because it shows categories that your target users are particularly interested in. Finally, behavior reports users coming into your website and engaging your content.
What report shows the percent of traffic that visited previously?
The New vs Returning report on Google Analytics enables you to view website traffic for two types of visitors: the new users who are visiting your site for the first time on a particular device and returning visitors which refer to users who have visited previously and are back to view your content again. You can find this data under Audience > Behavior and New vs Returning.
How you look at the different metrics on this report depends on your specific goals. For instance, if you have a content heavy website such as a blog, you probably want to view website traffic in high numbers under the returning category. E-commerce websites usually want to see more new visitors. If you ran a digital marketing campaign or sent out a newsletter, your newsletter site may not have as many returning visitors and that’s okay.
But which report shows the percentage of traffic that has visited your site before? This is still the new vs returning report. This report is important because it gives you a good look at your audience engagement. According to numerous studies, websites have the tendency to have more new visitors vs returning ones but repeat visitors are known to have higher engagement - something that is very important for making sure your content resonates with your target market.
