Website is the key business conversion instrument. That is actually the driving engine of your business. We’ve discussed multiple useful techniques for boosting your traffic. Now it’s time to discuss some useful hacks for measuring your success and why you should do it on a regular basis.

So, the first question is WHY you should analyze website statistics, and not only yours.

Statistics are an invaluable source of information. The analysis of the number of visitors, their actions, optimization and promotion results can help you refine your marketing strategy and make it more effective. First of all, you’ll manage to separate your target audience from the rest of it. Identifying the main traffic source, that brings the highest number of targeted audience and conversions is highly important. The number of time users spend on your website and pages they scroll etc. will help you better understand your audience and spot the possible downsides.

No matter what type your website is and what your objective is (conversions, email subscribers or simply more traffic), you should regularly check its statistics. Your competitor’s website is a separate topic for discussion. Analyzing its statistics can bring tons of useful information: their driving channels, keywords, posts that bring most traffic etc. with this extra info you’ll manage to hit the same keywords and topics, refine your marketing strategy and much more.

What to pay your attention to.

Sessions / Pages. Session implies a single visit of the user per a selected period of time. It is considered to be over, when a user leaves a page or stays inactive for at least 30 minutes. The number of sessions indicates whether your marketing strategy is successful or not. The number of pages a user pays attention to indicates the depth of your site. The higher this number is, the more interesting and useful your resource is.

Average session duration is an average number that provides a better search ranking if the number is bigger.

Users and the bounce rate. The number of unique users should not be confused with the session number. In this case only the number of unique users for a selected period of time matters, not the total amount of users. Bounce rate presents the number of users, who left within 15 seconds or even faster. Hence, the high bounce rate indicates a lack of interest in your website.

Channels or traffic sources like organic (search results), direct, paid search, social etc help you evaluate website SEO and define the most effective source. Devices analytics are crucial for making your website convenient and straightforward.

CTR (Click-through rate) is responsible for website performance. That is the key indicator that reflects the success of your website promotion. Clicks come along with CTR and show the way visitors interact with your website. Fixing the ignored features significantly improves website usability.

Scrollmap concerns the scrolling patterns of the visitors and makes sure that the most important information is placed at the right place.

The best tools to track users’ activity

Mostly, tracking tools fall under three main categories: traffic / behavioral / performance tracking tools.

Google Analytics can check actually all key indicators, including returning users, engagement, demographics, conversions etc. It’s actually a must-have for every business website and marketer. There is a free version, though a paid one removes all the limits and provides a new option for slicing data. The paid version is highly expensive – GA360 starts at $150,000/year.

Google Search Console tracks Website SEO Performance, impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and the average position of your keywords. It’s pretty simple to use and free.

Adobe Analytics is perfect for Business intelligence and traffic data from websites, emails, and apps, including page views, unique visitors, purchases, order attribution, segmentation, and customer journey analytics. AA provides no free version, has four interfaces and API. It’s a rather sophisticated tool for advanced users and enterprises. Pricing depends on your hits, can cost more than $100.00/year. Though its capacity is limitless.

SEMRush tracks domain performance, visits, visits per page, visit duration, traffic rank,  keywords and can compare up to 200 sites. Only 30 day trial version is free, the price varies between $119.95/month to $449.95/month.

Ahrefs tracks keyword rankings, backlinks, website speed, and broken links for your own and competitor websites. It provides a lot of information and has a simple and friendly interface. No free version though, monthly plan – $99.

In conclusion, Google Analytics is a real must and is probably the most used tool worldwide.  Google Search Console lets you analyze your search engine traffic, the way it’s ranked by search engines. SEMRush is a perfect tool for analyzing your competitors’ resources. As soon as you enter your competitor’s URL, you get the full bulk of analytics. Adobe Analytics is actually awesome, but for an advanced user. Ahrefs probably gives the best price-quality ratio for checking both your and competitor’s websites.

Actually, there are lots of free and paid tools at your disposal, but VAfromEurope always recommends using at least two at once to make sure the statistics are correct.