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How to Track Website Visitors : Benefits, Tools and FAQs
Businesses spend a ton of time, money and effort into creating websites that are not only helpful and captivating, but also highly effective at converting visitors. They’ll create content, revise designs, add new pages and change forms, all in the hope of getting visitors to stay on the site and convert into leads or customers.
When you track website visitors, you can see which of your efforts are moving the needle. While many people are familiar with pageviews as a metric, website visitor tracking can be much more in-depth and insightful.
In this article, we’ll cover how website visitor tracking works, what you can track, and how this information can improve sales and marketing results. We’ll also explain global privacy concerns and how businesses can choose the right tracking software.
What is website visitor tracking?
Website visitor tracking uses software and applications to track and analyse how visitors interact with your website. It’s a vital tool to help businesses understand whether their website design and content are having the desired effect.
Website visitor tracking includes very broad, non-specific data, like how many times visitors have come to your site. But it can also get very specific, with personal information about the user and even recordings of their visit to your site. Site visits, which may include visiting several different pages of the same site, are often referred to as “sessions.”
Although Google Analytics is the most widely used website visitor tracking software, it isn’t the most comprehensive or powerful. Companies that want a more in-depth understanding of their website may need to consider running a more precise tool alongside Google Analytics, like Matomo.
As we’ll cover later, website tracking has many important business applications, but it also poses privacy and security concerns, causing some states and countries to impose strict regulations. Privacy laws and your company’s values should also impact what web analytics tool you choose.
How website tracking works
Website tracking starts with the collection of data as users interact with the website. Tracking technologies like cookies, JavaScript and pixels are embedded into web pages. These technologies then gather data about user behaviour, session details and user actions, such as pageviews, clicks, form submissions and more.
More advanced tracking systems assign unique identifiers (such as cookies or visitor IDs) to individual users. This enables tracking of user journeys across multiple sessions and pages. These detailed journeys can often tell a different story and provide different insights than aggregated numbers do.
All this collected data is transmitted from the user’s browser to a centralised tracking system, which can be a third-party web analytics tool or a self-hosted solution. The collected data is stored in databases and processed to generate meaningful insights. This process involves organising the data, aggregating metrics, and creating reports.
Analytics tools process the collected data to generate reports and visualisations that provide insights into user behaviour. Metrics such as pageviews, bounce rates, conversion rates and user paths are analysed. Good web analytics tools are able to present these insights in a user-friendly way. Analysts and marketing professionals then use this knowledge to make informed decisions to improve the user experience (UX).
Advanced tracking systems allow data segmentation and filtering based on various criteria, such as user demographics, traffic sources, devices and more. This enables deeper analysis of specific user groups. For example, you might find that your conversion rate is much lower when your website is viewed on a mobile device. You can then dig deeper into that segment of data to find out why and experiment with changes that might increase mobile conversions.
3 types of website tracking and their benefits
There are three main categories of website tracking, and they each provide different information that can be used by sales, marketing, engineering and others. Here, we cover those three types and how businesses use them to understand customers and create better experiences.
Website analytics
Website analytics is all about understanding the traffic your website receives. This type of tracking allows you to learn how the website performs based on pageviews, real-time traffic, bounce rate and conversions.
For example, you would use website analytics to determine how effectively your homepage drives people toward a product or pricing page. You can use pageviews and previous page statistics to learn how many people who land on your homepage read your blog posts. From there, you could use web analytics to determine the conversion rate of the call to action at the end of each article.
User behaviour
While website analytics focuses on the website’s performance, user behaviour tracking is about monitoring and quantifying user behaviour. One of the most obvious aspects of user behaviour is what they click on, but there are many other actions you can track.
The time a user spends on a page can help you determine whether the content on the page is engaging. Some tracking tools can also measure how far down the page a user scrolls, which reveals whether some content is even being seen.
Session recordings are another popular tool for analysing user behaviour. They not only show concrete actions, like clicks, but can also show how the user moves throughout the page. Where do they stop? What do they scroll right past? This is one example of how user behaviour data can be quantitative or qualitative.
Visitor information
Tracking can also include gathering or uncovering information about visitors to your site. This might include demographic information, such as language and location, or details like what device a website visitor is using and on which browser they view your website.
This type of data helps your web and marketing teams make better decisions about how to design and format the site. If you know, for example, that the website for your business-to-business (B2B) software is overwhelmingly viewed on desktop computers, that will affect how you structure your pages and choose images.
Similarly, if visitor information tells you that you have a significant audience in France, your marketing team might develop new content to appeal to those potential customers.
Use website visitor tracking to improve marketing, sales and UX
Website visitor tracking has various applications for different parts of your business, from marketing to sales and much more. When you understand the impact tracking has on different teams, you can better evaluate your company’s needs and build buy-in among stakeholders.
Marketing
At many companies, the marketing team owns and determines what kind of content is on your website. From landing pages to blog posts to the navigation bar, you want to create an experience that drives people toward making a purchase. When marketers can track website visitors, they can get a real look at how visitors respond to and engage with their marketing efforts. Pageviews, conversion rates and time spent on pages help them better understand what your customers care about and what messaging resonates.
But web analytics can even help marketing teams better understand how their external marketing campaigns are performing. Tracking tools like Matomo reveal your most important traffic sources. The term “traffic source” refers to the content or web property from which someone arrives at your site.
For instance, you might notice that an older page got a big boost in traffic this month. You can then check the traffic sources, where you find that an influential LinkedIn user posted a link to the page. This presents an opportunity to adjust the influencer or social media aspects of your marketing strategy.
Beyond traffic sources, Matomo can provide a visual user journey (also known as User Flow), showing which pages visitors tend to view in a session and even in what order they progress. This gives you a bird’s-eye view of the customer journey.
Sales
Just like your marketing team, your sales team can benefit from tracking and analysing website visitor information. Data about user behaviour and visitor demographics helps sales representatives better understand the people they’re talking to. Segmented visitor tracking data can even provide clues as to how to appeal to different buyer personas.
Sales leadership can use web analytics to gauge interest over time, tie visitors to revenue and develop more accurate sales forecasts and goals.
And it’s not just aggregated website tracking data that your sales team can use to better serve customers. They can also use insights about an individual visitor to tailor their approach. Matomo’s Visits Log report and Visitor Profiles allow you to see which pages a prospect has viewed. This tells your sales team which products and features the prospect is most interested in, leading to more relevant interactions and more effective sales efforts.
User experience and web development
The way users interact with and experience your website has a big impact on their impression of your brand and, ultimately, whether they become customers. While marketing often controls much of a website’s content, the backend and technical operation of the site usually falls to a web development or engineering team. Website analytics and tracking inform their work, too.
Along with data about website traffic and conversion rates, web development teams often monitor bounce rates (the percentage of people who leave your website entirely after landing on a page) and page load time (the time it takes for an individual web page to load for a user). Besides the fact that slow loading times inconvenience visitors, they can also negatively affect your search engine optimization (SEO).
Along with session recordings, user experience teams and web developers may use heatmaps to find out what parts of a page draw a visitor’s attention and where they are most likely to convert or take some other action. They can then use these insights to make a web page more intuitive and useful.
Visitor tracking and privacy regulations
There are different data privacy standards in other parts of the world, which are designed to ensure that businesses collect and use consumer data ethically. The most-discussed of these privacy standards is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was instituted by the European Union (EU) but affects businesses worldwide. However, it’s important to note that individual countries or states can have different privacy laws.
Many privacy laws govern how websites can use cookies to track visitors. With a user’s consent, cookies can help websites identify and remember visitors. However, many web visitors will reject cookie consent banners. When this happens, analysts and marketers can’t collect information from these visitors and have to work with incomplete tracking data. Incomplete data leads to poor decision-making. What’s more, cookie consent banners can create a poor user experience and often annoy web visitors.
With Matomo’s industry-leading measures to protect user privacy, France’s data protection agency (CNIL) has confirmed that Matomo is exempt from tracking consent in France. Matomo users have peace of mind knowing they can uphold the GDPR and collect data without needing to collect and track cookie consent. Only in Germany and the UK are cookie consent banners still required.
Choosing user tracking software
The benefits and value of tracking website visitors are enormous, but not all tracking software is equal. Different tools have different core functionalities. For instance, some focus on user behaviour over traditional web analytics. Others offer detailed website performance data but offer little in the way of visitor information. It’s a good idea to start by identifying your company’s most important tracking goals.
Along with core features, look for useful tools to experiment with and optimise your website with. For example, Matomo enables A/B testing while many other tools do not.
Along with users of your website, you also need to think about the employees who will be using the tracking software. The interface can have a big impact on the value you get from a tool. Matomo’s session recording functionality, for example, not only provides you with video but with a colour-coded timeline identifying important user actions.
Privacy standards and compliance should also be a part of the conversation. Different tools use different tracking methods, impacting accuracy and security and can even cause legal trouble. You should consider which data privacy laws you are subject to, as well as the privacy expectations of your users.
Some industries have especially high data security standards. Government and healthcare organisations, for example, may require visitor tracking software that is hosted on their premises. While there are many purely cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) tracking tools, Matomo is available both On-Premise (also known as self-hosted) and in the Cloud.
Frequently asked questions
Here are answers to some of people’s most common questions about tracking website visitors.
Can you track who visited your website?
In most cases, tracking your website’s traffic is possible. Still, the extent of the tracking depends on the visitor-tracking technology you use and the privacy settings and precautions the visitor uses. For example, some technologies can pinpoint users by IP address. In other cases, you may only have access to anonymized data.
Is it legal to track someone’s IP address?
It is legal for websites and businesses to track someone’s IP address in the sense that they can identify that someone from the same IP address is visiting a page repeatedly. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), IP addresses are considered personally identifiable information (PII). The GDPR mandates that websites only log and store a user’s IP address with the user’s consent.
How do you find where visitors are clicking the most?
Heatmap tools are among the most common tools for learning where visitors click the most on your website. Heatmaps use colour-coding to show what parts of a web page users either click on or hover over the most.
Unique tracking URLs are another way to determine what part of your website gets the most clicks. For example, if you have three links on a page that all go to the same destination, you can use tracking links to determine how many clicks each link generates.
Matomo also offers a Tag Manager within the platform that lets you manage and unify all your tracking and marketing tags to find out where visitors are clicking.
What is the best tool for website visitor tracking?
Like most tools, the best website visitor tracking tool depends on your needs. Each tool offers different functionalities, user interfaces and different levels of accuracy and privacy. Matomo is a good choice for companies that value privacy, compliance and accuracy.
Tracking for powerful insights and better performance
Tracking website visitors is now a well-ingrained part of business operations. From sales reps seeking to understand their leads to marketers honing their ad spend, tracking helps teams do their jobs better.
Take the time to consider what you want to learn from website tracking and let those priorities guide your choice of visitor tracking software. Whatever your industry or needs, user privacy and compliance must be a priority.
Find out how much detail and insight Matomo can give you with our free 21-day trial — no credit card required.
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LGPD : Demystifying Brazil’s New Data Protection Law
31 août 2023, par Erin — PrivacyThe General Personal Data Protection Law (LGPD or Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais) is a relatively new legislation passed by the Brazilian government in 2018. The law officially took effect on September 18, 2020, but was not enforced until August 1, 2021, due to complications from the COVID-19 pandemic.
For organisations that do business in Brazil and collect personal data, the LGPD has far-reaching implications, with 65 separate articles that outline how organisations must collect, process, disclose and erase personal data.
In this article, you’ll learn what the LGPD is, including its contents and how a legal entity can be compliant.
What is the LGPD?
The LGPD is a new data protection and privacy law passed by the Federal Brazilian Government on May 29, 2018. The purpose of the law is to unify the 40 previous Brazilian laws that regulated the processing of personal data.
Many of the older laws have been either updated or removed to accommodate this change. The LGPD comprises 65 separate articles, and each covers a different area of the legislation, such as the rights of data subjects and the legal bases on which personal data may be collected. It also sets out the responsibilities of the National Data Protection Authority (ANPD), a newly created agency responsible for the guidance, supervision and enforcement of the LGPD.
LGPD compliance is essential for organisations wishing to operate in Brazil and collect personal data for commercial purposes, whether online or offline. However, understanding the different rules and regulations and even figuring out if the LGPD applies to you can be challenging.
Fortunately, the LGPD is relatively easy to understand and shares many similarities with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the data protection law implemented on May 25, 2018, by the European Union. This may help you better understand why the LGPD was enacted, the policies it contains and the goals it hopes to achieve. Both laws are very similar, but some items are unique to Brazil, such as what qualifies as a legal basis for collecting personal data.
For these reasons, organisations should not apply a one-size-fits-all approach to GDPR and LGPD compliance, for they are different laws with different guiding principles and requirements.
Who does the LGPD apply to, and who is exempt?
The LGPD applies to any natural person, public entity and private entity that collects, processes and stores personal data for commercial purposes within the national territory of Brazil. The same also applies to those who process the personal data of Brazilian and non-Brazilian citizens within the national territory of Brazil, even if the data processor is outside of Brazil. It also applies to those who process personal data collected from the national territory of Brazil.
So, what does this all mean?
Regardless of your location, if you conduct any personal data processing activities in Brazil or you process data that was collected from Brazil, then there is a high possibility that the LGPD applies to you. This is especially true if the data processing is for commercial purposes; or, to be more precise, for the offering or provision of goods or services. It also means that subjects whose personal data is collected under these conditions are protected by the nine data subject rights.
There are exceptions where the LGPD does not apply to data processors. These include if you process personal data for private or non-commercial reasons; for artistic, journalistic and select academic purposes; and for the purpose of state security, public safety, national defence and activities related to the investigation and prosecution of criminal offenders. Also, if the processed data originates from a country with similar data protection laws to Brazil, such as any country in the European Union (where the GDPR applies), then the LGPD will not apply to that individual or organisation.
For these reasons, it is vital that you are familiar with the LGPD so that your data processing activities comply with the new standards. This is also important for the future, as an estimated 75% of the global population’s personal data will be protected by a privacy regulation. Getting things right now will make life easier moving forward.
What are the nine LGPD data subject rights?
The LGPD has nine data subject rights. These protect the rights and freedoms of subjects, regardless of their political opinion and religious belief.
These rights, listed under Article 19 of the LGPD, confirm that a data subject has the right to:
- Confirm the processing of their data.
- Access their data.
- Correct data that is incomplete, not accurate and out of date.
- Anonymize, block and delete data that is excessive, unnecessary and was not processed in compliance with the law.
- Move their data to a different service provider or product provider by special request.
- Delete or stop using personal data under certain circumstances.
- Gain information about who the data processor has shared the processed data with, including private and public entities.
- Be informed as to what the consequences may be for denying consent to the collection of personal data.
- Revoke consent to have their personal data processed under certain conditions.
Many of these data subject rights are like the GDPR. For example, both the GDPR and LGPD give data subjects the right to be informed, the right to access, the right to data portability and the right to rectify false data. However, while the LGPD has nine data subject rights, the GDPR has only eight. What is the extra data subject right? The right to gain information on who a data processor has shared your data with.
There are other slight differences between the GDPR and LGPD with regard to data subject rights. For instance, the GDPR has a clear right to restrict certain data processing activities, such as those related to automation. The LGPD has this, too. But the subject of data collection automation is under Article 20, separate from all the data subject rights listed under Article 19.
Under what conditions can personal data in Brazil be processed?
There are various conditions under which organisations can legally conduct personal data processing in Brazil. The aim of these conditions is to give data subjects confidence — that their personal data is processed for only safe, legal and ethical reasons. Also, the conditions help data processors, both individuals and organisations, determine if they have a legal basis for processing personal data in or in relation to Brazil.
According to Article 7 of the LGPD, data processing may only be carried out if done:
- With consent by the data subject.
- To comply with a legal or regulatory obligation.
- By public authorities to assist with the execution of a public policy, one established by law or regulation.
- To help research entities carry out studies; granted, when possible, subjects can anonymize their data.
- To carry out a contract or preliminary procedure, in particular, one related to a contract where the data subject is a party.
- To exercise the right of an arbitration, administration or judicial procedure.
- To protect the physical safety or life of someone
- To protect the health of someone about to undergo a procedure performed by health entities
- To fulfill the legitimate interests of a data processor, unless doing so would compromise a data subject’s fundamental rights and liberties.
- To protect one’s credit score.
Much like the nine data subject rights, there are key differences between the LGPD and GDPR. The GDPR has six lawful bases for data processing, while the LGPD has ten. One notable addition to the LGPD is for the protection of one’s credit score, which is not covered by the GDPR. Another reason to ensure compliance with both data protection laws separately.
LGPD vs. GDPR: How do they differ?
The LGPD was modeled closely on the GDPR, so it’s no surprise the two are similar.
Both laws ensure a high level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects. They outline the legal justifications for data processing, establish the responsibilities of a data protection authority and lay out the penalties for non-compliance. That said, there are key differences between them.
First, data subject rights; the LGPD has nine, while the GDPR has eight. The GDPR gives data subjects the right to request a human review of automated decision-making, while the LGPD does not. Second, the legal bases for processing; the LGPD has ten, while the GDPR has six. The four legal bases unique to the LGPD are: for protection of credit, for protection of health, for protection of life and for research entities carrying out studies.
Both the LGPD and GDPR have different non-compliance penalties. The maximum fine for an infraction under the GDPR is up to €20 million (or 4% of the offender’s annual global revenue, whichever is higher). The maximum fine for an LGPD infraction is up to 50 million reais (around €9.2 million), or up to 2% of an offender’s revenue in Brazil, whichever is higher.
6 steps to LGPD compliance with Matomo
Below are steps you can follow to ensure your organisation is LGPD compliant. You’ll also learn how Matomo can help you comply quickly and easily.
Let’s dive in.
1. Appoint a DPO
A DPO is a person, group, or organisation that communicates with data processors, data subjects, and the ANDP.
Curiously, the LGPD lets you appoint your own DPO — even if they reside out of Brazil. So if the LGPD applies to you, you can appoint someone in your organisation to be a DPO. Just make sure that the nominated person has the understanding and capacity to perform the role’s duties.
2. Assess your data
Once you’re familiar with the LGPD and confirm your eligibility for LGPD compliance, take the time to assess your data. If you plan to collect data within the territory of Brazil, you’ll need to confirm the exact location of your data subjects.
To do this in Matomo, simply go to the previous year’s calendar. Then click on visitors, go to locations, and look for Brazil under the “Region” section. This will tell you how many of your web visitors are located in Brazil.
3. Review privacy practices
Review your existing privacy policies and practices, as there’s a good chance they’ll need to be updated to comply with the LGPD. Also, review your data sharing and third-party agreements, as you may need to communicate these new policies to partners that you rely on to deliver your services.
Lastly, review your procedures for tracking personal data and Personally Identifiable Information (PII). You may need to modify the type of data that you track to comply with the LGPD. You may even be tracking this data without your knowledge.
4. Anonymize tracking data
Data subjects under the LGPD have the right to request data anonymity. Therefore, to be LGPD compliant, your organisation must be able to accommodate for such a request.
Fortunately, Matomo has various data anonymization techniques that help you protect your data subject’s privacy and comply with the LGPD. These techniques include the ability to anonymize previously tracked raw data, anonymize visitor IP addresses, and anonymize relevant geo-location data such as regions, cities and countries.
You can find these features and more under the Anonymize data tab within the Privacy menu on the Matomo Settings page. Learn more about how to configure privacy settings in Matomo.
5. Comply with LGPD consent laws without cookies
By using Matomo to anonymize the data of your data subjects, this enables you to comply with LGPD consent laws and remove the need to display cookie consent banners on your website. This is made possible by the fact that Matomo is a cookieless tracking web analytics platform.
Unlike other web analytics platforms like Google Analytics, which collect and use third-party cookies (persistent data that remains on your device, until that data expires or until you manually delete it) for their “own purposes,” Matomo is different. We use alternative means to identify web visitors, such as count the number of unique IP addresses and perform browser fingerprinting, neither of which involve the collection of personal data.
As a result, you don’t have to display cookie consent banners on your website, and you can track your web visitors even if they disable cookies.
6. Give users the right to opt-out
Under the LGPD, data subjects have the right to opt-out of your data collection procedures. For this reason, make sure that your web visitors can do this on your website.
You can do this in Matomo by adding an opt-out from tracking form to your website. To do this, click on the cog icon in the top menu, load the settings page, and click on the Users opt-out menu item in the Privacy section. Then follow the instructions to customise and publish the Matomo opt-out form.
Achieve LGPD compliance with Matomo
Like GDPR for Europe, the LGPD will impact organisations doing business in Brazil. And while they both share much of the same definitions and data subject rights, they differ on what qualifies as a legal basis for processing sensitive data. Complying with the GDPR and LGPD separately is non-negotiable and essential to avoiding maximum fines of €20 million and €9.2 million, respectively.
As a web analytics platform with LGPD compliance, Matomo prioritises data privacy without compromising performance. Switch to a powerful LGPD-compliant web analytics platform that respects users’ privacy.
Get a 21-day free trial of Matomo today. No credit card required.
Disclaimer
We are not lawyers and don’t claim to be. The information provided here is to help give an introduction to LGPD. We encourage every business and website to take data privacy seriously and discuss these issues with your lawyer if you have any concerns.
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Introducing Crash Analytics for Matomo
Bugs and development go hand in hand. As code matures, it contends with new browser iterations, clashes with ad blockers and other software quirks, resulting in the inevitable emergence of bugs. In fact, a staggering 13% of all pageviews come with lurking JavaScript errors.
Monitoring for crashes becomes an unrelenting task. Amidst this never-ending effort to remove bugs, a SurveyMonkey study unveils a shared reality: a resounding 66% of individuals have encountered bug-ridden websites.
These bugs lead to problems like malfunctioning shopping carts, glitchy checkout procedures and contact forms that just won’t cooperate. But they’re not just minor annoyances – they pose a real danger to your conversion rates and revenue.
According to a study, 58% of visitors are inclined to abandon purchases as a result of bugs, while an astonishing 75% are driven to completely abandon websites due to these frustrating experiences.
Imagine a website earning approximately 25,000 EUR per month. Now, factor in errors occurring in 13% of all pageviews. The result? A potential monthly loss of 1,885 EUR.
Meet Crash Analytics
Driven by our vision to create an empowering analytics product, we’re excited to introduce Crash Analytics, an innovative plugin for Matomo On-Premise that automatically tracks bugs on your website.
View crash reports by evolution over time By offering insights into the precise bug location and the user’s interactions that triggered it, along with details about their device type, browser and more, Crash Analytics empowers you to swiftly address crashes, leading to an improved user experience, higher conversion rates and revenue growth.
Soon, Crash Analytics will become available to Matomo Cloud users as well, so stay tuned for further updates and announcements.
Say goodbye to lost revenue – never miss a bug again
Even if you put your website through the toughest tests, it’s hard to predict every little hiccup that can pop up across different browsers, setups and situations. Factors such as ad blockers, varying internet speeds for visitors and browser updates can add an extra layer of complexity.
When these crashes happen, you want to know immediately. However, according to a study, only 29% of surveyed respondents would report the existence of the site bug to the website operator. These bugs that go unnoticed can really hurt your bottom line and conversion rates, causing you to lose out on revenue and leaving your users frustrated and disappointed.
Detailed crash report Crash Analytics is here to bridge this gap. Armed with scheduled reporting (via email or texts) and automated alert functionalities, you gain the power to instantly detect bugs as they occur on your site. This proactive approach ensures that even the subtlest of issues are brought to your attention promptly.
With automated reports and alerts, you can also opt to receive notifications when crashes increase or ignore specific crashes that you deem insignificant. This keeps you in the loop with only the issues that truly matter, helping you cut out the noise and take immediate action.
Forward crash data Easily forward crash data to developers and synchronise the efforts of technical teams and marketing experts. Track emerging, disappearing and recurring errors, ensuring that crash data is efficiently relayed to developers to prioritise fixes that matter.
Track emerging, disappearing and recurring bugs Plus, your finger is always on the pulse with real-time reports that offer a live view of crashes happening at the moment, an especially helpful feature after deploying changes. Use annotations to mark deploys and correlate them with crash data, enabling you to quickly identify if a new bug is linked to recent updates or modifications.
Crash data in real time And with our mobile app, you can effortlessly stay connected to your website’s performance, conveniently accessing crash information anytime and anywhere. This ensures you’re in complete control of your site’s health, even when you’re on the move.
Streamline bug resolution with combined web and crash analytics
Crash Analytics for Matomo doesn’t just stop at pinpointing bug locations; it goes a step further by providing you with a holistic perspective of user interactions. Seamlessly combining Matomo’s traditional and behavioural web analytics features—like segments, session recordings and visitor logs—with crash data, this integrated approach unveils a wealth of insights so you can quickly resolve bugs.
For instance, let’s say a user encounters a bug while attempting to complete a purchase on your e-commerce website. Crash Analytics reveals the exact point of failure, but to truly grasp the situation, you delve into the session recordings. These recordings offer a front-row seat to the user’s journey—every click and interaction that led to the bug. Session recordings are especially helpful when you are struggling to reproduce an issue.
Visits log overlayed with crash data Additionally, the combination of visitor logs with crash data offers a comprehensive timeline of a user’s engagement. This helps you understand their activity leading up to the bug, such as pages visited, actions taken and devices used. Armed with these multifaceted insights, you can confidently pinpoint the root causes and address the crash immediately.
With segments, you have the ability to dissect the data and compare experiences among distinct user groups. For example, you can compare mobile visitors to desktop visitors to determine if the issue is isolated or widespread and what impact the issue is having on the user experience of different user groups.
The combination of crash data with Matomo’s comprehensive web analytics equips you with the tools needed to elevate user experiences and ultimately drive revenue growth.
Start in seconds, shape as needed: Your path to a 100% reliable website
Crash Analytics makes the path to a reliable website simple. You don’t have to deal with intricate setups—crash detection starts without any configuration.
Plus, Crash Analytics excels in cross-stack proficiency, seamlessly extending its capabilities beyond automatically tracking JavaScript errors to covering server-side crashes as well, whether they occur in PHP, Android, iOS, Java or other frameworks. This versatile approach ensures that Crash Analytics comprehensively supports your website’s health and performance across various technological landscapes.
Elevate your website with Crash Analytics
Experience the seamless convergence of bug tracking and web analytics, allowing you to delve into user interactions, session recordings and visitor logs. With the flexibility of customising real-time alerts and scheduled reports, alongside cross-stack proficiency, Crash Analytics becomes your trusted ally in enhancing your website’s reliability and user satisfaction to increase conversions and drive revenue growth. Equip yourself to swiftly address issues and create a website where user experiences take precedence.
Start your 30-day free trial of our Crash Analytics plugin today, and stay tuned for its availability on Matomo Cloud.
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Increasing Website Traffic : 11 Tips To Attract Visitors
For your website and business to succeed, you need to focus on building traffic.
However, you aren’t the only one with that goal in mind.
There are millions of other websites trying to increase their traffic as well. With that much competition, it’s important to make sure your website stands out. Accomplishing that can require a great deal of strategy.
We’ve compiled a list of tips to help you develop a solid plan for increasing website traffic, to expand your reach, grow your audience and boost customer engagement levels — creating more opportunities for your business.Using these tips, more visitors will find their way to your website — meaning more customers for your business.
Why is website traffic important?
Website traffic is essentially the number of people visiting your website. When someone lands on your site, they’re considered a visitor and increase your website traffic.
When your website traffic is high, you’ll get more clicks, customer interactions and brand engagement. As a result, search engines will have a positive impression of your website and send more people there, meaning even more people will see your content and have the opportunity to buy your product.
When using a website for your business or any other venture, tracking your website traffic using a web analytics solution like Matomo is critical.
With over 200 million actively maintained and visited websites in 2023, it’s important to make sure yours stands out if you want to increase your website traffic and grow your online presence.
11 tips for increasing website traffic
Here are 11 tips to increase your organic traffic and elevate your business.
1. Perfect your SEO
Optimising your website to show up in search engine results shouldn’t be overlooked, as 63% of consumers start researching a product by using a search engine. Search engine optimisation, or SEO, increases the visibility and discoverability of your website on search engine results pages (SERPs). SEO targets organic searches, which means it doesn’t add to social media traffic, direct traffic or referrals, and it isn’t paid traffic.
SEO is number one on this list for a reason — most of these tips will directly, or indirectly, improve your SEO efforts.
Steps to improve your search engine optimisation can include:
- Using relevant keywords that are incorporated naturally throughout your content
- Using a web analytics tool like Matomo, with its search keyword feature, to gain insights and identify opportunities for improvement
- Using descriptive meta titles and meta descriptions
- Link to your own content internally with descriptive anchor tags, and make sure unused pages are removed
- Keeping your target audience in mind and marketing your content toward them
- Making sure your website’s structure is optimised to be mobile-friendly, fast and responsive — such as with Matomo’s SEO Web Vitals feature, which monitors key metrics like your website’s page speed and loading performance, pivotal for optimising search engine results
2. Research the competition
It’s important to remember that while your business might be unique, it’s likely not the only one in its field. Thousands of other websites from other companies are also looking to improve their website traffic and increase sales, and you have to outcompete them.
Looking at what your competitors are doing is vital from a strategic perspective. You can see what their content looks like, how they’re framing their specific use cases and what target audience they’re marketing toward.
Knowing what your competitors are doing can help you find ways to improve your content and make it unique. Are your competitors missing a specific use case or neglecting a particular audience? Fill in their content gaps on your website, and pick up the traffic they’re missing.
3. Create high-quality, evergreen content
If your content is high-quality, visitors will read more of it and stay longer on your site. This obviously increases the likelihood they will purchase your product or service, and it tells search engines that your website is a good answer for a search query.
High-quality content will also be shared more often, leading to even more website traffic. You should aim to develop content that doesn’t lose relevance over time (aka “evergreen content”). If you include time-sensitive data, statistics or content in your website, blog posts or articles, it’ll be relevant only around that time frame.
While this month’s viral content is highly popular, it likely won’t be relevant in a few months. Instead, if you ensure your content is evergreen, it will continue to get engagement long after it’s published.
4. Implement creative visuals
It’s important to have engaging, fun and interactive media on your website to keep visitors on your site longer. Like good content, interesting visuals (and the resulting longer visits) can translate to more purchases (and favourable assessments by search engines).
Media can take the form of videos, infographics, images or web graphics.
With Matomo’s Media Analytics feature, you can automatically gain even deeper insights into how your visitors engage with your media content, enhancing your understanding of their preferences and behaviours.
If you have interesting, captivating visuals, visitors will be more likely to stay on your website longer and see what you have to offer. Without captivating visuals to break up walls of text, you’ll likely find visitors will tend to leave your site in favour of something more engaging.
Just make sure you design your visuals with your target audience in mind. Flashy, fun graphics might not be a good fit for a professional audience, but they’re great for younger audiences. If you get your audience correct, they may also share the images with others. Depending on your business, that might be a useful infographic shared across LinkedIn, or a picture of a clever use case shared on Pinterest.
As a bonus, if other companies use your graphics on their websites, that earns you some backlinks — more on those in a bit.
5. Create a comprehensive knowledge base
Having a knowledge base is critical to making sure your service or product is well understood and well documented, especially in the tech industry. If a visitor or potential customer is interested in your product or service, they need to know exactly what it will do for them and that they have a good foundation of support in case they need help. A knowledge base is also a good place for internal links (more on those in a bit).
Visitors can also use your knowledge base as a source of information, and if they cite you as a source, that’ll lead right back to more website traffic for you (see our backlinks section for more about this). If your website is a good source of information, visitors will come back to it again and again.
6. Use social media often and consistently
Digital marketing nowadays heavily relies on social media platforms. Having an online presence no longer means just having a website — if you’re not using social media sites, you’re missing out on a huge portion of potential visitors and customers.
A strong social media presence with profiles on platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram or LinkedIn can be invaluable for increasing your website traffic. Visitors to your social media profiles will click on regularly shared content, read your blog posts and possibly become customers.
Participating in relevant communities and networking with other companies in groups in your industry can also be invaluable. If you participate in online communities and forums for your niche, you can offer insight, answer questions and plug your website. All of this will increase your clicks, which will increase your website traffic.
If you’ve managed to build your own community on social media, make sure to keep them engaged! Implementing your own forum, hosting live chats and Q&As, offering helpful and engaging content will make sure visitors keep coming back and spreading the word.
7. Use email marketing or newsletters
Having an email list and sending marketing emails or newsletters is a great way to increase website traffic. You can offer exclusive content, and promise discounts or resources to your subscribers for when they return to your website. This will help keep your loyal audience engaged, entice new customers to subscribe to your newsletter, give you a chance to upsell to people who have already expressed an interest in your product and potentially convert curious subscribers into customers.
8. Make sure your content can earn backlinks
A backlink is when a website links to a different website — ideally using relevant anchor text — and it’s an effective strategy for increasing referral traffic, that is, visitors who get to your website via a link on another website. The more backlinks you have, the more your referral traffic will increase. Social share buttons make it easy for people to cite you on social platforms, too.
We’ve already talked about making expert content that’s link-worthy, but also make sure that you’re creating linkable assets (like those interesting visuals mentioned earlier), building relationships with other sites that will link to you (like by inviting an expert or influencer to write on your page and promote it from their platform, or by writing your own guest content for their sites) and sharing your own content. All of this can help increase your referral traffic, particularly when you’re linked from websites with a higher domain authority than you have.
You can also make sure your website is listed in online directories. Some sites will do interviews and roundups, as well — these are great opportunities to increase your backlinks.
9. Optimise your CTR
Click-through rate, or CTR, is the percentage of users who click on specific links to your website. A high CTR means your visitors are following a link — whether in an advertisement, a search result or a social media post — and a low CTR means they’re passing it by. Optimising your CTR can greatly improve your website traffic.
To improve CTR, identify successful elements such as copy, imagery, and offers in your ads, enabling you to amplify effective elements and minimise less impactful ones.
10. Ensure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly
If a visitor is frustrated by your site being slow, laggy, clunky or not mobile-friendly, they won’t stay long. That doesn’t look good to search engines if that’s how your visitors got there. Your website needs to be clean, responsive, user-friendly and accessible.
If your website is slow, try increasing your website’s performance by:
- Optimising images: Reduce the size of images and compress them for faster load times. Opt for JPEG format for photos and PNG format for graphics.
- Limit the use of plugins: If you are using a CMS like WordPress, consider removing plugins that are unnecessary or not essential.
- Embrace lazy loading: To further enhance site speed and reduce initial load times, set up your site to load images and content only as visitors scroll down. Prioritising the content and images at the top of the page makes the site feel faster. Some CMS platforms will offer this option, but others may require a bit of coding to set this up.
Many people rely on their phones to research services or products, especially if they’re doing a quick search. Make sure your website is friendly to mobile users. It should scale vertically and scroll smoothly so users aren’t frustrated when using your site. They should be able to find the info they need immediately without any technical issues.
11. Track your website’s metrics
As you test out each of these strategies to increase your web traffic, don’t forget to closely analyse the performance of your site. To truly understand the impact of your efforts, you’ll need a reliable web analytics solution. Think of a dependable web analytics solution as your website’s GPS. Without it, you’d be lost, unsure of your direction and missing out on valuable insights to steer your growth.
Matomo is a powerful web analytics tool that can help you do just that by providing information on your site visitors and campaign performance, complemented by an array of behavioural analytics features that delve into user interactions. Among these, our heatmap feature stands out, enabling greater insights into user interactions and optimisation of your site’s effectiveness.
Google Analytics is another powerful analytics option, though it has challenges with data accuracy; there are multiple other web analytics solutions as well.
Regardless of what web analytics solution you choose, the process of analysing your website metrics is incredibly important for identifying areas of improvement to increase website traffic.
Increasing your web traffic is a process
Increasing website traffic isn’t something you accomplish overnight. It’s a comprehensive, ongoing endeavour that requires constant analysis and fine-tuning.
By applying these tips to create consistent, high-quality content that gets spotlighted on search engines, shared on social media and returned to again and again, you’ll see a steady stream of increased traffic.
With Matomo, you can understand your visitor behaviour to see what works and what doesn’t as you work to increase your website traffic. Get your free 21-day trial now. No credit card required.
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How to Check Website Traffic As Accurately As Possible
18 août 2023, par Erin — Analytics TipsIf you want to learn about the health of your website and the success of your digital marketing initiatives, there are few better ways than checking your website traffic.
It’s a great way to get a quick dopamine hit when things are up, but you can also use traffic levels to identify issues, learn more about your users or benchmark your performance. That means you need a reliable and easy way to check your website traffic over time — as well as a way to check out your competitors’ traffic levels, too.
In this article, we’ll show you how to do just that. You’ll learn how to check website traffic for both your and your competitor’s sites and discover why some methods of checking website traffic are better than others.
Why check website traffic?
Dopamine hits aside, it’s important to constantly monitor your website’s traffic for several reasons.
Benchmark site performance
Keeping regular tabs on your traffic levels is a great way to track your website’s performance over time. It can help you plan for the future or identify problems.
For instance, growing traffic levels may mean expanding your business’s offering or investing in more inventory. On the flip side, decreasing traffic levels may suggest it’s time to revamp your marketing strategies or look into issues impacting your SEO.
Analyse user behaviour
Checking website traffic and user behaviour lets marketing managers understand how users interact with your website. Which pages are they visiting? Which CTAs do they click on? What can you do to encourage users to take the actions you want? You can also identify issues that lead to high bounce rates and other problems.
The better you understand user behaviour, the easier it will be to give them what they want. For example, you may find that users spend more time on your landing pages than they do your blog pages. You could use that information to revise how you create blog posts or focus on creating more landing pages.
Improve the user experience
Once you understand how users behave on your website, you can use that information to fix errors, update your content and improve the user experience for the site.
You can even personalise the experience for customers, leading to significant growth. Research shows companies that grow faster derive 40% more of their revenue from personalisation.
That could come in the form of sweeping personalisations — like rearranging your website’s navigation bar based on user behaviour — or individual personalisation that uses analytics to transform sections or entire pages of your site based on user behaviour.
Optimise marketing strategies
You can use website traffic reports to understand where users are coming from and optimise your marketing plan accordingly. You may want to double down on organic traffic, for instance, or invest more in PPC advertising. Knowing current traffic estimates and how these traffic levels have trended over time can help you benchmark your campaigns and prioritise your efforts.
Increasing traffic levels from other countries can also help you identify new marketing opportunities. If you start seeing significant traffic levels from a neighbouring country or a large market, it could be time to take your business international and launch a cross-border campaign.
Filter unwanted traffic
A not-insignificant portion of your site’s traffic may be coming from bots and other unwanted sources. These can compromise the quality of your analytics and make it harder to draw insights. You may not be able to get rid of this traffic, but you can use analytics tools to remove it from your stats.
How to check website traffic on Matomo
If you want to check your website’s traffic, you’d be forgiven for heading to Google Analytics first. It’s the most popular analytics tool on the market, after all. But if you want a more reliable assessment of your website’s traffic, then we recommend using Matomo alongside Google Analytics.
The Matomo web analytics platform is an open-source solution that helps you collect accurate data about your website’s traffic and make more informed decisions as a result — all while enhancing the customer experience and ensuring GDPR compliance and user privacy.
Matomo also offers multiple ways to check website traffic:
Let’s look at all of them one by one.
The visits log report is a unique rundown of all of the individual visitors to your site. This offers a much more granular view than other tools that just show the total number of visitors for a given period.
You can access the visits log report by clicking on the reporting menu, then clicking Visitor and Visits Log. From there, you’ll be able to scroll through every user session and see the following information:
- The location of the user
- The total number of actions they took
- The length of time on site
- How they arrived at your site
- And the device they used to access your site
This may be overwhelming if your site receives thousands of visitors at a time. But it’s a great way to understand users at an individual level and appreciate the lifetime activity of specific users.
The Real-time visitor map is a visual display of users’ location for a given timeframe. If you have an international website, it’s a fantastic way to see exactly where in the world your traffic comes from.
You can access the Real-time Visitor Map by clicking Visitor in the main navigation menu and then Real-time Map. The map itself is colour-coded. Larger orange bubbles represent recent visits, and smaller dark orange and grey bubbles represent older visits. The map will refresh every five seconds, and new users appear with a flashing effect.
If you run TV or radio adverts, Matomo’s Real-time Map provides an immediate read on the effectiveness of your campaign. If your map lights up in the minutes following your ad, you know it’s been effective. It can also help you identify the source of bot attacks, too.
Finally, the Visits in Real-time report provides a snapshot of who is browsing your website. You can access this report under Visitors > Real-time and add it to your custom dashboards as a widget.
Open the report, and you’ll see the real-time flow of your site’s users and counters for visits and pageviews over the last 30 minutes and 24 hours. The report refreshes every five seconds with new users added to the top of the report with a fade-in effect.
The report provides a snapshot of each visitor, including:
- Whether they are new or a returning
- Their country
- Their browser
- Their operating system
- The number of actions they took
- The time they spent on the site
- The channel they came in from
- Whether the visitor converted a goal
3 other ways to check website traffic
You don’t need to use Matomo to check your website traffic. Here are three other tools you can use instead.
How to check website traffic on Google Analytics
Google Analytics is usually the first starting point for anyone looking to check their website traffic. It’s free to use, incredibly popular and offers a wide range of traffic reports.
Google Analytics lets you break down historical traffic data almost any way you wish. You can split traffic by acquisition channel (organic, social media, direct, etc.) by country, device or demographic.
It also provides real-time traffic reports that give you a snapshot of users on your site right now and over the last 30 minutes.
Google Analytics may be one of the most popular ways to check website traffic, but it could be better. Google Analytics 4 is difficult to use compared to its predecessor, and it also limits the amount of data you can track in accordance with privacy laws. If users refuse your cookie consent, Google Analytics won’t record these visits. In other words, you aren’t getting a complete view of your traffic by using Google Analytics alone.
That’s why it’s important to use Google Analytics alongside other web analytics tools (like Matomo) that don’t suffer from the same privacy issues. That way, you can make sure you track every single user who visits your site.
How to check website traffic on Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that lets you analyse the search traffic that your site gets from Google.
The top-line report shows you how many times your website has appeared in Google Search, how many clicks it has received, the average clickthrough rate and the average position of your website in the search results.
Google Search Console is a great way to understand what you rank for and how much traffic your organic rankings generate. It will also show you which pages are indexed in Google and whether there are any crawling errors.
Unfortunately, Google Search Console is limited if you want to get a complete view of your traffic. While you can analyse search traffic in a huge amount of detail, it will not tell you how users who access your website directly or via social media behave.
How to check website traffic on Similarweb
Similarweb is a website analysis tool that estimates the total traffic of any site on the internet. It is one of the best tools for estimating how much traffic your competitors receive.
What’s great about Similarweb is that it estimates total traffic, not just traffic from search engines like many SEO tools. It even breaks down traffic by different channels, allowing you to see how your website compares against your competitors.
As you can see from the image above, Similarweb provides an estimate of total visits, bounce rate, the average number of pages users view per visit and the average duration on the site. The company also has a free browser extension that lets you check website traffic estimates as you browse the web.
You can use Similarweb for free to a point. But to really get the most out of this tool, you’ll need to upgrade to a premium plan which starts at $125 per user per month.
The price isn’t the only downside of using Similarweb to check the traffic of your own and your competitor’s websites. Ultimately, Similarweb is only an estimate — even if it’s a reasonably accurate one — and it’s no match for a comprehensive analytics tool.
7 website traffic metrics to track
Now that you know how to check your website’s traffic, you can start to analyse it. You can use plenty of metrics to assess the quality of your website traffic, but here are some of the most important metrics to track.
- New visitors: These are users who have never visited your website before. They are a great sign that your marketing efforts are working and your site is reaching more people. But it’s also important to track how they behave on the website to ensure your site caters effectively to new visitors.
- Returning visitors: Returning visitors are coming back to your site for a reason: either they like the content you’re creating or they want to make a purchase. Both instances are great. The more returning visitors, the better.
- Bounce rate: This is a measure of how many users leave your website without taking action. Different analytics tools measure this metric differently.
- Session duration: This is the length of time users spend on your website, and it can be a great gauge of whether they find your site engaging. Especially when combined with the metric below.
- Pages per session: This measures how many different pages users visit on average. The more pages they visit and the longer users spend on your website, the more engaging it is.
- Traffic source: Traffic can come from a variety of sources (organic, direct, social media, referral, etc.) Tracking which sources generate the most traffic can help you analyse and prioritise your marketing efforts.
- User demographics: This broad metric tells you more about who the users are that visit your website, what device they use, what country they come from, etc. While the bulk of your website traffic will come from the countries you target, an influx of new users from other countries can open the door to new opportunities.
Why do my traffic reports differ?
If you use more than one of the methods above to check your website traffic, you’ll quickly realise that every traffic report differs. In some cases, the reasons are obvious. Any tool that estimates your traffic without adding code to your website is just that: an estimate. Tools like Similarweb will never offer the accuracy of analytics platforms like Matomo and Google Analytics.
But what about the differences between these analytics platforms themselves? While each platform has a different way of recording user behaviour, significant differences in website traffic reports between analytics platforms are usually a result of how each platform handles user privacy.
A platform like Google Analytics requires users to accept a cookie consent banner to track them. If they accept, great. Google collects all of the data that any other analytics platform does. It may even collect more. If users reject cookie consent banners, however, then Google Analytics can’t track these visitors at all. They simply won’t show up in your traffic reports.
That doesn’t happen with all analytics platforms, however. A privacy-focused alternative like Matomo doesn’t require cookie consent banners (apart from in the United Kingdom and Germany) and can therefore continue to track visitors even after they have rejected a cookie consent screen from Google Analytics. This means that virtually all of your website traffic will be tracked regardless of whether users accept a cookie consent banner or not. And it’s why traffic reports in Matomo are often much higher than they are in Google Analytics.
Given that around half (47.32%) of adults in the European Union refuse to allow the use of personal data tracking for advertising purposes and that 95% of people will reject additional cookies when it is easy to do so, this means you could have vastly different traffic reports — and be missing out on a significant amount of user data.
If you’re serious about using web analytics to improve your website and optimise your marketing campaigns, then it is essential to use another analytics platform alongside Google Analytics.
Get more accurate traffic reports with Matomo
There are several methods to check website traffic. Some, like Similarweb, can provide estimates on your competitors’ traffic levels. Others, like Google Analytics, are free. But data doesn’t lie. Only privacy-focused analytics solutions like Matomo can provide accurate reports that account for every visitor.
Join over one million organisations using Matomo to accurately check their website traffic. Try it for free alongside GA today. No credit card required.
