Basic Guide to Web Traffic Analytics (2024)

When you hear the term "website traffic analytics", what comes to mind? It's essentially aprocess of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data about your website's visitors and their activities. By understanding this data, you can make better decisions to attract more visitors, retain them, and ultimately, increase your conversions.

Website traffic analysis isn't just about how many people visit your website. There are several crucial aspects you need to understand:

This article will give you all the knowledge you need about web traffic and tools toanalyzeit, using Google Analytics 4 and OWOX BIasexamples.

Tomeasure the performance ofawebsite, analysts and marketers look atwebsite traffic: the total number ofwebsite visitors along with information onwhere they came from and how they got from there tothe site.

Understanding website traffic analytics becomes much easier when you comprehend the key terms involved. Let's delve deeper into each one, so you have asolid foundation to build upon.

• Events (Hits)are requests your site receives from visitors. This includes webpage loads (known as page_view), images or button clicks (click event), interactions with forms on your site (form_start and form_submit events) and much more. However, events may not be a true reflection of a visit because a single page can generate multiple events.

• Sessionsare set of interactions, such as page views, page iteractions or e-commerce activities that take place within a given time frame by a single user. It's a way to bundle all the events taken by one visitor during their visit to your site in a session by sessionization.

• Usersrefers to unique visitors of your site and taking actions on it. Users can have multiple sessions on your site.

• Metricsare units of measurement in data analytics. Metrics provide quantifiable data, such as the number of page views, the time spent on site, or the bounce rate.

• Event parametersare specific settings or criteria used to filter or classify your analytics data. They could include geographical location, age, gender, or behavior of your users.

• Dimensionsdescribe the characteristics of your data. Dimensions can be used to organize, segment and categorize data for better analysis and reporting. For instance, the 'city' dimension could help you understand where your visitors are located.

Each of these terms plays its own role in web traffic analysis.

Having a proper analytics setup will not only improve your understanding of website traffic analytics, but also help you to analyze and optimize your website more effectively.

Your toolbox for traffic analysis will contain anumber oftools to visualize and explore your site metrics. These services are programmed toexamine your website from the inside out and give you areport based onthis examination.

The most popular (and free) tool for website analysis isGoogle Analytics 4. It’s perfect for beginners and has anadvanced paid version—Google Analytics 360— for websites with a lot oftraffic.

Google Analytics 4 shows data about website traffic and data onuser behavior inthe form of events and sessions. Actions onthe website are registered as events, and then those events are merged into sessions according toGoogle Analytics 4 logic.

What you should know about your web traffic are its sources, channels, and metrics. This would help you answer the most important questions asawebsite manager or owner:

• Which pages are attracting the most visitors?
  
• How much time they're spending on those pages,
• Where they're coming from (e.g., social media, Google search, paid ads)
• How do they convert website visitors into leads or customers?
• and even the path they take through your site...

This information empowers you to identify what's working well on your website and what's not, where improvements could be made, which marketing strategies are driving traffic, and most importantly, how you could increase your conversion rates to drive business growth.

You can find answers tothese questions bylooking atsources and channels inreports and dashboards.

Google Analytics isreally very powerful for analyzing websites, but ithas its limitations which are not socomfortable for marketers and business owners:

• Itdoesn’t account for internal data (such as sales data from your CMS or CRM)
• Itdoesn’t take product refunds into consideration
• Itdoesn’t consider cost data for non-Google campaigns
• Its attribution models are black box and limited
• You can't build LTV or cohort reports, and you can’t evaluate ROPO-effect and build suitable reports because of the lack ofnecessary data

Ifyou’ve already encountered these limitations and tried toavoid them with the help of Google Analytics 360, you’ll know that sometimeseven Google Analytics 360 isn’t enough.

Luckily, for businesses that dream big, there are special tools for end-to-end analytics.

Asawebsite ispart ofthe overall marketing and business strategy, it’s essential toanalyze itinthe overall context: connected with advertising channels, affiliate expences, your CRM or CMS systems, email marketing tools and other data flows.

Toestablish end-to-end analytics, start by collecting all of your marketing and sales data into one place, create a single source of truth for data across your organization and merge the data flows.

Wewould like tointroduce you toOWOX BI— an all-in-one marketing analytics platform designed specifically toavoid the limitations of Google Analytics 4 and to be a powerful personal analytics assistant for marketers.

OWOX BIhelps you collect, normalize, and merge data fromdifferentsourcesand prepare for reporting:

• Behavioral data from your website​ - and correctly find the acquisition sources of conversions;
• Adcost data - and attribute each dollar spent to users and their sessions across your website;
• Offline sales data - and empower your advertising campaigns with the exact amount of revenue value;
• CRM / CMS / Internal data - and build reports of any complexity so you are able to merge the data that seems unblendable;
• Call tracking data, email marketing data, and much more.

OWOX BIcollects all ofthis data automatically without data sampling soyou can create a complete database for all kinds ofreports: LTV, ROPO, historical analysis, predictive models, machine learning funnel-based attribution, and forecasted marketing performance.

Have you ever dreamed about atool that would give you this level of granularity and predictive opportunities injust a few clicks?

Without grouping all these website interactions into sessions, it's impossible to effectively use them for web performance analysis.

Keep in mind that every analytics system has its own unique logic for creating sessions from events. Imagine having alist of all website activities but lacking the details, like who executed those actions, how long they were taking place, or how regularly.Without this information, you would be blind when it comes to analyzing website activities and performance.

This brings us back to sessions - they are fundamental for analyzing web traffic. The total number of sessions is a metric that provides some immediate insights. In fact, it's often the first pre-processed data that you'll spot in your reports.

Website analytics reportingisthe way for an analytics system to inform you about the things happening onyour website.

You can use prebuilt reports (such asasocial media traffic report) orbuild your reports bycombining metrics, parameters, and dimensions.

• www.yourbestfriendwebsite.com
• youtube.com
• thebestbusinessesreview.us
• google.com
• facebook.com,
• www.owox.com, etc.

The point isthat people can visit your website from different types oflinks and through different channels.

When the source is undefined, typically the traffic is marked as Direct.

This happens for one of 2 main reasons:

• The User types the URL in the browser (or uses a bookmarked tab);
• The source is not specified due to privacy regulations and cookie restrictions.

The channel refers tothe way inwhich avisitor navigates toyour site. For example, these are some ofthe channels inGoogle Analytics 4:​

• organic (free search traffic: eg. Google or Bing search)
• paid search (paid search: eg. Google ads)
• referral (your partners, affiliates)
• display (banner ads)
• social (social media posts: eg. Instagram stories)
• email (email marketing)
• none (undefined or unset medium)
• other (you can pre-configure custom UTM tags based on your mediums)

You can read more about UTM tagging and use itinyour own web traffic analysis. It’s handy tocreate custom segments onthe basis ofchannels and analyze targeted traffic apart from all other traffic.

• organic​
• paid

Data about organic keywords ishidden due toGoogle’s policies, while data onpaid keywords isvisible and available for your analysis. That’s the reason, some reports will show a«not provided» value. You can also get «not provided» values from apaid channel ifyour campaigns are not correctly set.

Here is how OWOX BI helped to discover 2.4 times more keywords assisting in conversions and increasing PPC advertising ROI by 17%.

Now that are familiar with sources, mediums, channels, and keywords, wecan proceed tochannel grouping - the way to analyze your traffic by your rules.

Channels for Google Ads traffic

• Paid Shopping (Source platform is "Google Ads" AND Google Ads campaign type is "Shopping")
• Paid Search (Source platform is "Google Ads" AND Google Ads ad network type is one of "Google Search", "Google Partners")
• Paid Video (Source platform is "Google Ads" AND Google Ads ad network type is one of "YouTube Search", "YouTube Videos")
• Display(Source platform is "Google Ads" AND Google Ads ad network type is one of "Google Display Network")
• Paid Social (Source platform is "Google Ads" AND Google Ads ad network type is one of "Social")
  

Channels for other traffic

• Direct (Source exactly matches "(direct)" ANDMedium is one of ("(not set)", "(none)")
• Cross-network (Campaign Name contains "cross-network")
• Paid Shopping(Source matches a list of shopping sites OR Campaign Name matches regex ^(.*(([^a-df-z]|^)shop|shopping).*)$) AND Medium matches regex ^(.*cp.*|ppc|retargeting|paid.*)$)
• Paid Search (Source matches a list of search sites AND Medium matches regex ^(.*cp.*|ppc|retargeting|paid.*)$)
• Paid Social (Source matches a regex list of social sites AND Medium matches regex ^(.*cp.*|ppc|retargeting|paid.*)$)
• Paid Video (Source matches a list of video sites AND Medium matches regex ^(.*cp.*|ppc|retargeting|paid.*)$)
• Display (Medium is one of (“display”, “banner”, “expandable”, “interstitial”, “cpm”)
• Paid Other (Medium matches regex ^(.*cp.*|ppc|retargeting|paid.*)$)
• Organic Social (Source matches a regex list of social sites OR Medium is one of (“social”, “social-network”, “social-media”, “sm”, “social network”, “social media”)
• Organic Video (Source matches a list of video sites OR Medium matches regex ^(.*video.*)$)
• Organic Search (Source matches a list of search sites OR Medium exactly matches organic)
• Referral (Medium is one of "referral", "app", or "link")
• Email (Source = email|e-mail|e_mail|e mail OR Medium = email|e-mail|e_mail|e mail)
• Affiliates (Medium = affiliate)

It’s handy touse this grouping in ageneral way, but asyou know, these groups are aggregated, sothey can hide some insights that might be useful for you.

For example, ifyou want toanalyze traffic from your outreach campaign, you should create acustom channel group based ofareferral channel, separating traffic with the help ofUTM tags.

Choosing the right dimension-metric combination, you can find a lot of useful insights for your website development. Wouldn’t it be great if someone could recall all the dimension-metric combinations for you? OWOX BI Smart Data knows popular dimension-metric combinations to build any kind of report in a couple of clicks, without hours of thinking over the report structure.

• You can only show four segments inone report.
• AdWords cost data won’t bedisplayed with segments (itwill give you a0value).
• Conversion segments must beused for multi-channel funnel reports.

Segments are important based onthe understanding that aggregate data can’t help you alot («All data inaggregate iscrap,» according toAvinash Kaushik, who knows what he’s talking about). But ifyou slice and dice your data the right way, you’ll see many interesting insights.

InGoogle Analytics, you can create asegment inany kind ofreport.

• New visits/ total traffic

User→User Attributes →Demographic details

If you want to find out where your customers come from to optimize your ads campaigns, develop the website, and email marketing, you need this report. These primary dimensions are available in the Demographic details report: Country, Region, City, Language, Age, Gender, and Interests. The report shows a map of the world by default, and color saturation demonstrates the proportion of sessions from different regions.

• Behavioral metrics: Bounce Rate, Average Visit Duration, Pages per Visit​

Audience → Overview

This group ofmetrics shows your visitors’ behavior onthe website: whether they’re active and interested— Average Session Duration metric, how long they stay onthe site— Page/ Sessions metric, how fast they leave the site— Bounce Rate, etc. Also, inthe device and platform dimensions, you can find insights about how page loading speed and website presentation ondifferent devices influence your visitors’ behavior. Sometimes, waiting for the page toload ispainful and people leave the website; the bounce rate starts growing, and you can notice this tomake improvements.

• Pages investigations: landing &exit pages​

Behavior → Site Content → Landing Pages,

Behavior → Site Content → Exit Pages

This isanother dimension toinvestigate. Looking atall behavioral metrics atthe level ofpages will help you understand the most popular and least popular pages and give ahint about what todotoimprove the situation. For example, ifone ofyour checkout pages isamong the popular exit pages, itmight beasign oftechnical problems.

• On-page event tracking

Behavior → Site Search

You may track alot ofevents onyour website, from asimple click anywhere onthe page toconversion events: purchases, email subscriptions, comments and feedback, etc. Why doyou have totrack all ofthese events? Ifyou want togrow, you should look atkeywords your customers are entering inthe search bar and identify the most popular and least popular buttons.

• Multi-channel funnel investigations​

Conversions → Multi-Channel Funnel → Overview

Ifyou imagine away toget from anywhere onthe internet tomake apurchase onyour site, you can see that’s along path. Orafunnel, asmarketers callit. Website analytics tools help you understand the sequence ofchannels that lead avisitor tomake aconversion and show the importance ofeach channel.

Ifyou see that your typical user journey, a sequence of channels that takes to convert you visitor into customer, has more than three channels, you need a perfect attribution model that would evaluate the whole hero's journey and the contribution of each channel at each funnel stage.

The standard attribution model won’t fit your needs, asone ofthe channels will beovervalued while the value of other channels would beunderestimated.

Find out how tosolve this attribution problem with OWOXBI.

Onyour way toend-to-end analytics, you’ll get tothe stage ofmerging the sales data, also known as internal / CMS / CRM data with the user behavior data and, basically your cost data.

Atthis stage, you’ll enrich your on-site analytics data with information about sales performance and completed orders. Asimple way todothat isusing OWOX BI.

With sales and CRM data, you can evaluate the real value of your marketing efforts, and estimate the whole sales funnel performance without missing important insights.

You can get answers tothese questions with OWOX BI:

• What was the order completion rate by the campaign?
• What was the ROAS bygross profit bysource and medium?
• How many transactions were recorded inthe CRM and how many customers were there ineach store over agiven period oftime?
• What’s myROPO effect?
• and much more...

Get your questions answered faster.Build an end-to-end analytics system with OWOX BI, make wise decisions about your website performance and cross-channel budget allocation and move from chaos to clarity.

Start with simple tools for investigating web traffic and progress tomore sophisticated tools. Every business has tofind the perfect set ofanalytic tools inorder togrow. Consider the limitations offree versions oftools and get ready for each step onyour way toend-to-end analytics.

After all, web traffic analytics isprobably the first step of your journey to gain data clarity.