How To Check Your Website Traffic and What to Learn From It

If you are new to affiliate marketing or just getting started with creating a website, it is likely that you don’t know how to check your website traffic. Don’t worry, it really isn’t very hard if you know where to turn. Website traffic is the lifeblood for your online business, so you definitely want to know how much traffic you are getting. There are a few more key elements that are crucial to improving your traffic and search engine rankings when you are an affiliate marketer. You will want to know which pages or posts that your visitors are viewing and which pages or posts that they stay on the longest, as well as how they are finding your website.

Google Analytics

Checking Google analytics regularly will give you a good idea of how much traffic your website gets on a daily basis. It can also tell you where that traffic is coming from. This will let you know if your time spent on social media is paying off or if you should ditch that avenue all together. Follow these steps:

1. Go to https://analytics.google.com
2. Create an account if you don’t already have one
3. Add a tracking code to your website. You’ll receive a tracking code to paste into your website so Google knows when your site is visited.
4. In a few hours, you can check your audience. Google needs a bit of time to collect data, so wait a few hours after pasting the code to check and see where your traffic is coming from.

Check out Your Acquisition

Whether you love social media or want to focus solely on search engine optimization, you want to pay attention to how people are finding your website. It may surprise you that for all your focus and emphasis on search engine optimization, most of your visitors are finding you through social media. If that is the case, you may want to shift your focus a bit more to sharing and commenting on social media sites and within social media groups.

However, if you have been focusing a great deal of time with social media and your efforts don’t seem to be paying off, it could be a good time to change strategies. Spend a bit of time evaluating what people are talking about in the social media groups and see if your content really is relevant. You may want to spend a bit of time refining your SEO strategy or even try your hand at pay per click.

When it comes to traffic and results, numbers don’t lie. So, check your Google Analytics audience and find out precisely what your traffic volume is and where that volume is coming from. This will help you tremendously going forward as an affiliate marketer.

Don’t fret if you have been at it only a few months and discover that your numbers are efforts are barely reaching 100 people. This is normal in the beginning. It takes a bit of time for the search engines to trust your website and start to refer people to your page. If your site is relatively new, it is highly likely that most of your traffic will come from sharing on social media. Your friends and family will be your best allies in getting the word out about your website!

Learn About Your Audience

When you write your content, it is ideal to have a certain type of person in mind. I write a website about the ketogenic diet and home fitness. I expected that most of my audience would be middle-aged women like myself. However, when I checked my gender demographics on Google Analytics, I was surprised to discover that my audience was about evenly split between genders. This means that going forward, I should select products that would appeal to both sexes. I should write as though my audience is co-ed.

Over time, your audience may change as you refine your writing and narrow down a target audience. You may discover that the product that is selling the best on your website suits a younger or older demographic than you anticipated. That is fine. Just adjust and discover what other things may appeal to them. Stay on top of the trends that your audience is interested in and your website will stay relevant.

Average Session Duration and Bounce Rate

You want to pay attention to the average session duration and the bounce rate on your website. This gives you a good idea of how relevant and engaging your content is to the reader. If people are immediately getting off your website, it may be that the website doesn’t look that inviting and you may want to change up the graphics or the colors. It may be that your writing is a bit rough and you will need to check your spelling and grammar.

Your writing may be wonderful, but it may look too cumbersome. People visit websites, but when they see large blocks of text, they may face some mental fatigue and leave the website. Try to break up your text with visuals, bullet points and smaller paragraphs. This is more appealing to the internet reader.

Engage your audience with your content! This is one of the more difficult tasks as a writer. Your goal is to create something that is not only informative, but interesting enough to comment on. Ask your readers questions, encourage them to make comments in the comment box. This will not only boost your rankings, but also help you to get to know your readers better. It will improve your average session duration and your bounce rate.