If you're running a business, you know that there are always more details than you imagined with every step along the way. How much traffic your business gets is one of those details. If you were running a brick and mortar store, you would be very aware of traffic levels and how many potential customers were coming through the door.
If you're running a website (let’s assume you are since you are reading this article), then your concern should be the internet traffic that comes to your site.
Is anyone visiting? Are they well qualified? Do you know what pages they are most interested in and what pages are bringing the traffic to your site from Google? Putting up a website and having no idea if people are coming to it is a bit like opening a store but never caring if someone comes in or not.
Thankfully, there are options for tracking the internet traffic to your website. The good thing is, not all of them cost money. The bad thing is, not all of them are accurate. In this article we’ll focus on two common tracking sources, one free and one paid. Both of these are very reliable and happen to be what we often use here at Half a Bubble Out. How you choose to measure your website traffic will depend on your business revenue, marketing budget and strategy needs.
Here are a couple of traffic measurement tools that we use here at Half a Bubble Out and the benefits they can bring:
Google Analytics: a Free Option for Measuring Your Site Traffic.
Google Analytics is a service that Google provides to any website owner. All you have to do is place the Google Analytics code on your website and it will start tracking the traffic that comes to your site. This process is somewhat technical, as it's dealing with code, but with helpful Google Analytics instructions it’s really not that hard. You'll need access to the back-end of your website to place to code. If you're using a site builder like Squarespace or Wix, search their help sections to find out where to place the code.
Once your Google Analytics tracking is all set up, you have access to metrics such as:
- The amount of traffic your site is getting
- Referring sites
- The geographic location site traffic is from
- The path that site visitors take from page to page
- The language your site visitors speak
- And much more.
Here is a video from Google to help you get started with Google Analytics:
If you really want to learn the program, signing up for the Google Analytics Academy is a good idea.
HubSpot: A Paid Option for Measuring Your Website Traffic & More
One of the main marketing automation platforms that we use in our marketing agency is HubSpot. Part of the reason is because it’s an integrated platform that allows us to do a lot more than view interent traffic, such as –
- Publish websites
- Create and publish blogs
- Automated email marketing
- Track keywords
- Post to social media
- Traffic source tracking, and more.
One of our favorite features is the easy view of website traffic and sources. Hubspot will show you who came in from organic sources (like Google searches), referral traffic, social media, paid traffic and others. They also put it all in one easy-to-read graph which is useful for understanding the growth of a website.
The benefit of using HubSpot for traffic management is that it's easy and all integrated. The downside is that it does cost money, so you'll have to decide if it's worth it for your business. It may be, especially if you're looking to do more than just view website traffic.
There are a myriad of services out there to help you monitor traffic, some free and some paid. Some are more reliable than others. It's hard to get more comprehensive than with Google Analytics, and since it’s free that is always a good place to start. We also recommend using Google Analytics alongside another platform like HubSpot since that will give you the best of both worlds and further insight when needed.
The important thing in it all is that you are monitoring your interent traffic and traffic sources. This will help you to see if your marketing efforts and dollars are doing anything, and it will allow you to observe traffic as you make changes to your website to see what is successful and what isn’t.
If all of this seems a little overwhelming and you would rather hire someone to grow, track and convert traffic on your website then contact us today.
Since 2002, Half a Bubble Out has been dedicated to providing marketing, advertising and small business consulting that meet the needs of our clients. We specialize in powerfully telling stories through Inbound Marketing to grow your business filled with more passion and provision. Based in Chico California, we serve clients throughout Northern California and across the country to New York.
