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How Much Traffic Is Your Website Getting, and how to tell if it’s good or bad?
Ever wonder how much traffic your website getting?? And can you use this information to help improve your marketing? Let’s dive into your Google Analytics to find out!
Tracking your website traffic is crucial. It tells you if your marketing—from social media to SEO—is actually working!
Viewing the Traffic Report in GA4
To view how much traffic your website is getting, logon to Google Analytics and navigate using the left hand side menu Acquisition > Traffic.
This shows you the number of users and sessions to your site as a total And
You can now see where they came from - organic search, paid search, organic social media, email, direct.
What’s the difference between users and sessions?
Users are the total number of individuals that came to your website during your viewing period.
Sessions are the total number of times a user (or person) visits your website, so a user or person might visit your website multiple times.
When you scroll across the table to the right-hand side, you can see how many key events or conversions each channel has. If you don’t see any key events, then you may need to set these up based on what are the key ‘actions’ you want visitors to your website to take.
What if you want more detail of where the traffic is coming from?
The default channels are all rolled up totals of multiple channels. For example, organic social media will capture traffic from Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, and all the other social platforms. Organic search will give you a rolled-up total for all the different search engines like Google, MS Bing, DuckDuck Go, etc.
You can see this detail to give you more insight into which specific marketing activity drives traffic to your website.
To do this, select the Column heading on the Traffic data table. You will see a little downward-pointing arrow. Select this and then select ‘Source / Medium’. The data will reload broken down into individual channels instead of the default parent groups.
So how do you tell if the volume of traffic is good or bad?
A number is just a number until you give it some context. And the context for you will depend on your business – and the nature of what you are selling!
If you were a consultant with a high project engagement fee, then you may not need a lot of traffic to generate the number of leads you want to achieve your business goals.
A e-commerce store selling low- to medium-priced products will look for high volumes to support a high volume of sales.
It’s all about context for your business. So a few tips to work this out for yourself are:
- Comparisons: Using industry benchmarks to assess can be helpful to understand whether the volumes are typical for your industry but often for a small business it’s not … so Comparing yourself to competitors is another way to assess your traffic. Using the likes of Simliarweb and SEMrush allows you to understand traffic volumes from your competitor site and can give you context around whether your volume of traffic is good – or not.
- Historical data: Historical data on your traffic can help, particularly to see whether you are increasing traffic over time, which would be a good sign that your marketing is working! It can also show seasonality, such as peak times of the year when you get more traffic, and this can also inform your marketing.
- Conversion rates: Understanding whether the traffic to your website is converting into leads or sales is key to determining whether the traffic is good or bad. Lots of traffic to your website and no conversions is clearly a problem that you will want to work on! If you are getting conversions, you can then assess the number against your goals.
- Traffic sources: Understanding where the traffic is coming from is a good way to assess whether your marketing works in each channel. If you put in lots of effort with your social marketing content, you can see whether it’s converting into visitors likewise, if you’re spending money on ads! If you are not seeing the volumes you want, then it’s time to do something with this information!
So what do you do with this information?
- Set Benchmarks for yourself to beat.
If you haven’t set goals before, use your traffic data to start setting your own benchmarks. Understanding your current state of play in terms of traffic helps you establish a benchmark to improve upon month on month. I love this part: measuring and monitoring give you the power to actively and systematically take steps to improve your business, and this data can be used to help you set the starting line!
2. Start a process of "Keep start stop" for optimisation and improvement.
Keeping on doing things the same way over and over is not a way to improve your marketing. Using your traffic data to understand what you should keep doing or start doing and what you should stop doing is a simple way to take your data and put it into action.
As a starting point, this means looking at which channels are getting traffic and which aren’t. Then, decide on what you want to change to see if this will improve the traffic.
For example, if you can see that you are not getting any traffic from social media, does this mean that you should stop the current approach and try something new?
This is a process of making changes to your marketing, whether it’s social media, search optimisation, email, or paid ads, to see whether, over time, you can increase the volume of traffic.
For example, possible actions you might take if you are not seeing decent volumes from your social media would be:
If you notice that you are not getting any traffic from social media in your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) data, there are several strategic changes you can make to drive more traffic to your website from your social media efforts. Here are some suggestions:
- Optimize Your Social Media Profiles by updating links and your profile descriptions.
- Experiment with different content to see if you can get more engagement
- review the call to action you are using and ensure that they do have a clear reason for visiting your website
- Monitor and analyse your social media metrics to understand which content gets the best engagement and drives traffic so you can create more of this type of content going forward. If you want to automate a report to be generated, take a look at our article on automating Google Analytics reports.
In summary, how much traffic is your website getting is interesting but not useful unless you can put context around it to assess whether it’s good or bad. Then, with this information, you can decide how to use it to increase your traffic and improve your marketing results.
