Website traffic refers to the number of people who visit a website. This visit can come from various sources namely:
Organic search – through the search engines; and it can based on keywords used in search.
Direct search – when a url is specifically typed into google search bar, and
Referrals – visitors coming from other websites, social media, and paid ads.
On the other hand, website audience refers to a particular group of people who visit a website, the length of time they stayed, and how they engaged with the site. Their characteristics like age, location, interest, gender can all be measured.
After studying your audience it is also possible to segment them based on what they did on the site.
What factors contribute to Website Traffic
As we’ve learnt earlier, the on page SEO factors we put in place when writing our post all contribute to helping visitors find our sites. For example
- Using keywords at vantage places in blog posts;
- Writing high quality content;
- Provision for sharing posts on social media;
- Engagement on social media;
- People linking back to the site.
How Important is Website Traffic Monitoring?
Customising a site for SEO helps understand a site’s performance. You can check dates, time and frequency of visitors. Also checked is the time of stay on the site, known as bounce rate. Such analysis is also needed when you run ads for offers on your site. There are free and also paid tools for this purpose. These tools check organic traffic as well as traffic from other sources like social media.
If you want to go for such a tool make sure it has all the features you need.
Free Traffic Feed Tools
An example is the free Live Traffic Feed also known as Feedjit tool. It actually shows a visitor’s location, time of visit and the page visited. It can be added to a site through adding html code pasted manually into the site’s theme or html window. A plugin version can also be used I stead.
Feedjit is a real time traffic checker, that is very simple to set up and use. It can help in decision making and improve content creation as it states exactly where visitors land on a website.
There are several real time traffic checkers, both free and paid to check out.
Other Benefits of the Free Traffic Checker Tool
It helps in deciding what improvements to make to the site. For example instead of deleting a page, you may decide to leave a page intact if you see people landing on it.
Products can also be introduced for the benefit of visitors.
Not everyone likes to see a live traffic feed on his site. However if you decide to use it, learn how to customise and set it properly and make the most of it.
Heat Map Tools
An alternative to using a live traffic feed is to use a heat map. It is a tool that shows data in the form of a map or diagram. The individual values are represented by various colours. It is possible to understand user experience just by looking at the map, with a key showing what the various colours stand for. It shows where visitors are on your site using spotted sightings.
User behaviour analysis
The objective of using these tools is to find and determine who the actual audience of your website are, by analysing their behaviours, target and engage with returning visitors while providing them with valuable information, and products.
General factors that help in Audience Targeting
Website themes must be mobile friendly to aid user experience. This means blog pages must be easy to access on mobile first and then the design is used for desktop.
Statistica – “…58.99% of all web traffic was accessed through mobile phones.”
Social media share buttons that enable sharing of your posts on social media must be installed. Your presence on social is also desirable so visitors can move from blog to social and vice versa
Website content can be localised to suit your geographic location. Terms, language, names and telephone numbers used in the location are needed for this.
Segmentation of audience based on what they showed interest in also is necessary for follow up with exact needs
After getting some traffic you’ll want to increase it in order to get more targeted audience. That will be the subject of another post.
I think you now know the difference between website traffic and website audience. this should help you what to focus on or not.
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