When you manage or own a website, it’s important to be always on top of your site’s performance and check site traffic regularly. Understanding how your site is doing and learning how to check website traffic is key to constantly improving your space and keeping your visitors happy.
Strikingly has a built-in Analytics dashboard that lets you see website traffic. With this tool, you can view information such as where your visitors are coming from (country) as well as your site’s traffic sources - e.g. direct traffic, other sites, social media, etc. Overall, it offers a good general overview of how your site is doing. However, if you want a more granular view and more in-dept website traffic checking, here are a few tips to help you get started.
1. Add Google Analytics to your website
Arguably the best way to check website traffic Google Analytics is used by hundreds of millions of websites all over the world. It gets you pretty much everything you want and need to know about your site’s performance. What report shows the percent of site traffic that visited previously? Check out the New vs. Returning report. If you’re wondering which report shows the percentage of traffic that has visited your site before? You will get the data you need from New vs. Returning report as well.
Having said that, Google Analytics is an invaluable tool that you can use to track your website traffic. You can build an entire digital marketing plan around the information you gain from this tool. And best of all, it’s totally free.
How to Add Google Analytics
To get access to your website’s Google Analytics data, you need to get verified as the owner of the website. Create a GA account if you don’t have one yet and add your website as a property. This will take you to a straightforward process of website ownership verification which includes adding a tracking code to your website.
2. Use traffic estimation tools
If there is one limitation to the power of Google Analytics, it’s that you can’t check other website traffic. It doesn’t allow you to “stalk” competitor websites and find out how much traffic they are getting. This is information that you would find helpful in shaping your website content and digital marketing campaign. You probably want to learn how other similar websites are doing and take away techniques that might be working to their advantage.
The best way to check out other websites is through traffic estimation tools. Here are some of the most popular ones:
- SimilarWeb - This is a great way to scope out competitors in your specific industry. Using the free service, the website will give you the top 50 ranking websites in every industry, category and country. You can also search for a particular domain and find out more about that site’s statistics.
- SEMRush - While it’s mostly a search engine optimization tool, SEMRush can also be a helpful site for website traffic checking. It doesn’t give you absolute numbers but you can get a good estimate of how much traffic a site is getting from this platform. If you want to learn more about a website, the keywords it is ranking for and the keywords it uses, you can get this data from SEMRush.
Traffic Estimate - If you want to learn more about a website’s traffic patterns over a significant period of time, Traffic Estimate is a nifty tool to have handy. It offers a good general overview of traffic data on a site for the past 30 days to a year. You will also find targeted keywords that the site uses to give you a good idea on the kind of keywords that might work on your own website.
