If traffic quantity as a raw number can be considered a vanity metric, doing a thorough analysis of your traffic is far from an unimportant step.
Understanding your web traffic is one of the most important factors for the success of your strategy. The problem is that traffic analysis is usually very superficial and only performs the following:
If we compare organic traffic in May with that of the previous month, what an incredible number! We increased our traffic by 14%. Almost 430 thousand more visits than the previous month. Therefore, we can conclude that our SEO strategy is a success.
However, this analysis of the figures is completely flawed and superficial. Despite this growth, if we look more deeply into the month of October, we will see that the growth was not as desired.
An interesting analysis is one in which you understand what your annual growth is and the percentage of annual traffic that each month usually brings to your blog. This will give you a better perspective of your monthly performance.
Take, for example, a comparison of January to October in 2018 and 2017.
It is interesting to see how the years follow a growth pattern. If we look at 2016 we will have a similar graph. January is usually a month with less traffic, as well as July and December, which are seasonally weaker months.
However, keep in mind that in 2017, May was the best month of the first half and October was much higher than that.
In 2018, our October month grew much less compared to May. This shows that this year we were not able to maintain the growth we had in previous years.
The blog grew little in the second half of 2018. This shows that our analysis cannot be limited to month-over-month and the percentage of growth between them.
Important evaluations
As we’ve seen, traffic alone doesn’t mean america phone number list much. And neither do the green numbers on Google Analytics dashboards from month to month. It’s essential to know which are the most important metrics and results to monitor according to our objectives.
As an example, we will point out three interesting indicators that we like to follow here at Rock and that you can apply as well. Of course, you can add other metrics and analysis focused on your specific situation.
1. Expected growth
As in the previous example, an important find out which is the best digital account application for companies indicator that we follow here is the expected growth for the year. In line with the growth of previous years, we make a projection and consider the traffic that each month usually represents annually.
From that, we have a growth projection. That way, we can see that growth in the second half of the year was not satisfactory, not because there was no increase month-on-month, but because growth was low based on the performance potential of those months.
Since we used this example before, I won’t spend too much time talking about expected traffic. Let’s move on to the next KPI .
2. Traffic quality
As we said, traffic itself is a vanity b2c phone list metric. It’s no use having a liquor store and the traffic is mostly children and teenagers.
So, there are some data and metrics that will help indicate whether the traffic you are receiving is made up of exactly the visitors you want.
3. Conversions
The first and most important factor is conversions . They are the main indicator of whether your blog visitors are really the people you want to attract. To do this, it is essential that you have conversion points on your website and blog, taking your visitor through the sales funnel.
After all, your ultimate goal is to convert them into customers and/or promoters of your brand .
This analysis helps you understand visitors and drop-offs at each stage of the funnel. It often results in a large number of conversions at the top of the funnel, but that still doesn’t guarantee that they are the desired visitors, i.e. those who are willing to move through the customer journey .
You can track these conversions through automation tools like Hubspot, Mautic, Mailchimp, and RD Station . Or you can create goals and conversions within Google Analytics to track the quality of your traffic and the results generated by the visits.
It is important to always remember to segment traffic into “Organic Traffic”; after all, we want to analyze the traffic coming from Google.