The Importance of Measuring Site Traffic

There has been a lot of debate over the importance of measuring site traffic.  This is because some people think that tracking the overall level of traffic will detract from more important issues like conversion rates and social metrics.  While it’s true that you can’t entirely focus on the traffic to your site, it can provide you with a lot more insight that simply the number of people showing up every day.  Here is a closer look at the importance of measuring site traffic and how it can be extremely beneficial to your overall online strategy.

1.    Tracking Your Progress
While traffic may not be everything, it can be used as an excellent baseline.  How will you know whether or not your SEO strategies are actually helping if you don’t measure site traffic?  While traffic alone won’t give you the full picture, it is an essential baseline for tracking your overall progress.  If you don’t have a baseline metric that you can use to gauge your overall site growth then it will be impossible to know what changes actually made a positive impact.  For example, if you are tracking the conversion rate of your sales page and suddenly see it get cut in half, you may instantly think that something is wrong with your sales page.  While your sales page may need a little tweaking, there are a lot of other variables that could account for this drop.  For example, may you started getting new source of cold traffic.  Cold traffic is always harder to convert so a surge in cold traffic will always lower your overall conversion rate.  If you aren’t measuring site traffic, then you would never realize this.

2.    Find Out Where Your Traffic Is Actually Coming From
Another reason that it is important to measure site traffic is that it gives you a chance to understand where your website visitors are coming from.  This is important for several reasons.  From a big-picture point of view, measuring site traffic can tell you where everyone is coming from and when.  If you discover that your traffic regularly spikes on Thursday, then that might be the best day to have a 24 hour sale or post new content to your blog.  Understanding the nature of your visitors will allow you optimize the rest of your online marketing.  From a more detailed point of view, measuring site traffic allows you to place a hard number on how effective each aspect of your marketing campaign is – what works and what doesn’t.

3.    Manage Resource Allocation
The importance of measuring site traffic really reaps benefits when it comes to allocating your online marketing budget.  For example, if you are trying to get more out of your Twitter account for several months, looking at the number of Follower simply isn’t enough.  The only way to know if they are actually translating into website traffic is to track it.  There is nothing worse than sinking hundreds or thousands of dollars into a traffic generation strategy only to see it fail.  Fortunately, as long as you are tracking your website traffic, you will be able to reallocate resources effectively.  Essentially, it will tell you what campaigns are working and which ones are not, which makes deciding what strategy gets more money a no-brainer.

The importance of measuring site traffic cannot be overstated.  At the same time, you need to make sure that aren’t only look at the number of visitors, but also where they came from and what they did once they got to your site.

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