Introduction to Web Traffic
Just like traffic on a main road refers to the number of cars traveling down the road, website traffic is that the variety of website users who travel to any given website. Everybody who logs on to a website is recorded as a visit or session, with a beginning and ending purpose, thank to the behind the scene communications between a user's device and also the website itself.
Web traffic is restricted to every page of your website also, thus whether or not you've got a one-page website or a fifty page site, every of these page's traffic is configured independently of all other pages. Anyway here the three ways to get traffic measures for any website.
Method 1 : Use a Traffic Estimation Tool:
There are two different types of traffic estimation tools that are:
Tools that estimate total traffic: guests to your website can come from every kind of places like search engines, forums and social media etc. These tools estimate the full quantity of traffic from all sources.
Tools that estimate only organic traffic: Most of the websites get a good block of their traffic from search engines like Google, this can be indicate to as “organic traffic.” Estimates from these tools don’t take under consideration traffic from the other sources (e.g., social media) besides organic traffic.
- To know how much traffic a website gets:
- Total visits
- Pages per visit
- Average visit duration
- Bounce rate
Where does the data come from?
To understand the reliability of this information, it’s very important that we know where it comes from. SimilarWeb get their information from a range of sources that collect unknown data concerning user’s on-line activity.
They don’t say how massive their coverage is, however they don’t get data from everyone in the world. Therefore their information comes from a comparatively small sample of the “online population.
Which tool is best for comparing multiple sites?
Sometimes, it’s not most of estimating traffic with irrational preciseness, but rather having the ability to match the relative popularity of two or more sites.
For example, just imagine that you have a list of one hundred outreach prospects, and you wish to prioritize your outreach efforts beginning with the sites that receive the most traffic. In this case, you wish to match the sites to every different and rank them in order of traffic. So which tool is best for doing this? Here are the list of some best and popular tools to do this in quick manner:
- Alexa
- SEMrush
- Similar Web
- Ahrefs
- Quick Sprout
- BuiltWith
So which traffic estimation tool should you use?
It’s important to notice that every of those tools do various things. SimilarWeb estimates total traffic, on the other hand Ahrefs estimates organic (i.e., Google) traffic. One of the distinctive benefit of SimilarWeb is that you simply will see where the majority of traffic to a website is coming back from (e.g., organic search, social, etc.).
Method 2. Look for an “advertise with us” page:
Most bloggers receive such a big amount of “I’m interested in advertising on your site, what sort of traffic does it get?” emails that it makes sense to publish this data on a publicly accessible advertising page.
Here is the example of a page geekwire.com, this page has 2M views per month and 1.2M unique visitors per month. It’s not simply the large sites that do this, either; I’ve seen many of individual bloggers with similar pages. But how to find these pages anyhow?
The easiest and simple way to find with following Google Search. For instance search for (site:website.com advertise with us). Nine times out of ten, if they need such a page, it'll be the primary result. Not seeing traffic stats on the advertising page? See if there’s a link to a “media pack” loads of websites include their traffic stats here.
Still, this plan of action doesn’t continuously work for three simple reasons:
- Not all websites have “advertise with us” pages.
- Traffic Stats are not continuously published on them.
- Traffic numbers aren’t continuously up-to-date
If you are doing or try to find “advertise with us” page with traffic stats, continuously try to check if they’re up to date. Most websites will list once they were last updated but some don’t.
Method 3. Ask:
If you would like to know correct, up-to-date traffic statistics for a website, you’ll need to get in-touch with the owner and ask them directly. You will be shocked. Several bloggers are perfectly willing to share this information with those with a genuine reason for asking, such as:
- You’re interested to buy their website.
- You want to advertise on their site
Like I said, most of the bloggers are going to be happy to share up-to-date traffic numbers with real advertisers. Several will even screenshot Google Analytic data as proof.
While this methodology is usually the most reliable way to analyze traffic stats, it’s not 100% foolproof. Here’s why:
- Some bloggers/webmasters can compose traffic stats so as to sell advertising.
- Not everybody has Google Analytic installed. Various of them will trust on less than accurate analytic platforms (e.g., WordPress plugins) for their data.
- Google Analytic will be simply miss-installed, which means that information is not always correct. If reported traffic sounds too high, try to check their website for duplicate GA code.
Few tips for estimating website traffic:
Estimated traffic stats are an honest start line, but you'll be able to tell a lot about the popularity of a website by manually checking many things, such as:
- # of comments on their posts (on average);
- # of YouTube video views;
- # of social shares;
- Engagement levels on their fan pages (i.e., Facebook page, Twitter, etc.)