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• How to Check Website Traffic : A Complete Guide

  26 février, par Daniel Crough — Analytics Tips, Marketing

  If 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.

  Checking website traffic is a great way to get a dopamine hit when things are up. And it’s a great way to troubleshoot problems when things go down. It’s also a critical data source for marketing and web teams. But to get the most out of it, you need reliable data sources, the ability to track them over time and a way to monitor the competition.

  This article explains how to check website traffic (for your site and your competitors), explores nine tools that can help and discusses why some methods are better than others.

  Why check website traffic ?

  Dopamine hits aside, monitoring website traffic is crucial to a business — even for a primarily brick-and-mortar operation. In this internet age, customers and prospects are far more likely to research a company online before buying anything.

  SOCi’s 2024 Consumer Behavior Index found that 8 in 10 US consumers use the internet to search for local businesses at least once a week. And Statista found that 55% of UK shoppers always do some online research before making a major purchase.

  And trend lines suggest these numbers are likely to continue climbing. Businesses need to know what’s happening on their sites, and that’s difficult to achieve without traffic data.

  Indeed, website data allows companies to better understand their target audiences, measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts and channels, and identify areas of the website that need work.

  Let’s dig into those ideas in a little more detail.

  

  Benchmark site performance

  Keeping regular tabs on traffic levels is a great way to track a website’s performance over time. It can help with planning for the future and identifying current problems.

  For instance, rising traffic levels may mean expanding the business’s offering or investing in more inventory. On the flip side, decreasing traffic levels may suggest it’s time to revamp marketing strategies or look into issues impacting SEO.

  Analyse user behaviour

  Checking website traffic, user behaviour, and other metrics shows marketing managers how users interact with the website. These traffic stats can help answer questions like :

  • Which pages are users visiting ?
  • Which CTAs are they clicking on ?
  • Which page elements encourage users to take the desired actions ?

  It can also identify issues contributing to high bounce rates or declines in search rankings.

  The better user behaviour is understood, the easier it is to give visitors what they want. For example, the data could reveal that users spend more time on landing pages than blogs. These valuable insights can be used to optimise blog content and improve performance.

  Improve the user experience

  Once user behaviour is well understood, it’s easier to make adjustments, update content and improve the overall user experience. This also allows companies to create more personalised customer experiences, which can lead to growth. Research shows companies that get personalisation right generate 40% more revenue from those activities than average players.

  That could take the form of sweeping changes like rearranging a website’s navigation bar based on user behaviour. It could also be personalisation that uses analytics to transform sections or entire pages based on individual user behaviour.

  Optimise digital marketing strategies

  Knowing current traffic levels and how they trend over time helps teams set benchmarks and prioritise marketing efforts.

  Monthly traffic reports can inform SEO efforts and benefit marketing attribution. For example, they could indicate when the time is right to double down on organic traffic or when the better strategy would be to invest more in PPC advertising.

  Increasing organic traffic levels from other countries can help businesses identify new marketing opportunities. If traffic levels from a neighbouring country or a growing market increase significantly, it could be time for a cross-border campaign.

  Filter unwanted traffic

  A significant chunk of every website’s traffic comes from bots and other unwanted sources. This can compromise the quality of website data and make it harder to draw useful insights. While it’s nearly impossible to get rid of this traffic completely, many analytics tools have features to filter it out of the stats.

  Why check competitors’ website traffic

  Websites are windows into businesses and their strategies. That’s why monitoring traffic and other metrics drawn from competitors is essential.

  There’s a lot to learn from the competition, both good and bad. What competitors do well can be replicated, and learning from the elements they get wrong can help you avoid making the same mistakes.

  • Strategic planning : Looking at traffic on specific pages can offer insight into potential marketing campaigns and highlight gaps in the market that may be worth attacking. Looking at their organic, paid, social and referral traffic levels can highlight opportunities for growth or pinpoint the reasons for success in a particular area.
  • Benchmarking : Looking at website traffic in isolation can lack context. Monitoring other sites’ engagement metrics, like bounce rate and average session duration, can give you an inside look at the competition, which can help you set realistic performance goals and benchmarks.
  • Product Development : Significant traffic volume on certain pages can indicate shifts in demand and market trends, which may inform the development of new products or services. For example, if a competitive dog food supplier ranks well for the term “organic dog food”, that might be something to consider when formulating new products.
  • Audience demographics : Comparing audience demographics between competitors can highlight opportunities and help a business narrow down its target audience. This guides messaging and campaign strategies to capture specific audience segments.
  • Keyword opportunities : Examining the keywords driving the most traffic to a competitor’s website can help you uncover untapped SEO potential for your website. Analysing top-performing content on competing sites can help identify content improvement strategies to pull traffic away from competitors.
  • Partnerships : Referrals are an often overlooked traffic metric. High volumes of such traffic indicate successful partnerships between competitors and third parties, which is a model worth emulating.

  7 key website traffic metrics to track

  Traffic metrics are not a case of one-size-fits-all. Those that are important today may not be tomorrow. It all depends on the priorities and goals at any one moment. That said, there are a few traffic metrics that always matter to some degree.

  • New visitors : These are users who have never visited the website before. They are a great sign that marketing efforts are working and the website is reaching more people. But it’s also important to track how they behave on the website to ensure the site caters effectively to the needs of new visitors.
  • Returning visitors : Returning visitors are coming back to the website for a reason : either they like the content they find or want to buy something. Either way, it’s excellent news. The more returning visitors, the better.
  • Bounce rate : This measures how many users leave the website without taking action. Different analytics tools measure this metric differently.
  • Session duration : This is the time users spend on the website, which can reveal whether they find the site engaging. And when considered alongside the next metric, it can be especially insightful.
  • Pages per session : This measures the average number of pages users visit on a website. The more pages they visit and the longer users spend on the website, the more engaging it is.
  • Traffic source : Traffic can come from various sources (organic, direct, social media, referral, etc.). Knowing the highest sources of referral traffic can help analyse and prioritise marketing efforts.
  • User demographics : This shows who visits a website, what device they use, what country they come from, etc. While most website traffic will come from the countries targeted by marketing, an influx of new users from other countries can open the door to new opportunities.

  9 tools to check website traffic

  There are thousands of different web analytics tools that can provide decent website traffic analysis and functionality checks. They all use a similar combination of sophisticated algorithms, data collection techniques, statistical analysis and machine learning to deliver insights into visitor behaviour and site performance.

  Most web analytics tools work by embedding bits of JavaScript or other tracking codes into a website. When users land on a website, it gathers data such as page views, session duration, and specific interactions. Many also use cookies to identify returning visitors, which lets them monitor user behaviour over time.

  Many tools offer advanced event-tracking functionality. This captures specific actions, like clicks or form submissions, and provides a more granular view of engagement. The data is then statistically analysed to spot trends and calculate key metrics like bounce rates and conversion rates.

  Some web analytics tools use machine learning to predict future user behaviour based on historical patterns. Others aggregate data to provide insights via charts comparing website performance with selected competitors’ websites.

  This section explores nine popular tools for checking website traffic and highlights their unique features and benefits.

  1. Checking website traffic with Google Analytics

  Google Analytics is usually the first place to start for anyone looking to check their website traffic. It’s free to use, incredibly popular and offers a wide range of traffic reports.

  It breaks down historical traffic data in many different ways. It can split traffic by acquisition channel (organic, social media, direct, etc.), by country, device or demographic. It also provides real-time traffic reports that offer a snapshot of users on the 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 (GA4) is difficult to use compared to its predecessor, and it also imposes data tracking limits in accordance with privacy laws. If users refuse cookie consent, Google Analytics won’t record those visits. In other words, using Google Analytics alone doesn’t provide a complete view of the traffic.

  

  Also, GA4 relies on sampling when processing large datasets or complex queries. When the volume of data exceeds certain thresholds, it only considers a subset of the data to generate reports instead of processing every single data point.

  There are pros and cons to this approach. While it speeds up analysis and reduces the load on the system, it can also lead to inaccuracies in insights delivered. When analysing traffic patterns over a busy period, GA4 may only use a portion of the data to calculate and then extrapolate metrics.

  As a result, trends or anomalies might be overlooked or misconstrued, which could mean missed opportunities or poor decisions. 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, it’s possible to track every single user who visits the website.

  2. Checking website traffic with Google Search Console

  Google Search Console is a free tool that analyses a website’s Google search traffic. The top-line report shows how many times the website has appeared in Google Search, how many clicks it has received, the average clickthrough rate and its average position in the search results.

  

  It’s a great way to understand what the website ranks for and how much traffic organic rankings generate. It will also show which pages are indexed in Google and whether there are any crawling errors.

  Unfortunately, Google Search Console is limited if a complete view of traffic is needed. While the search traffic can be analysed in great detail, it will not report how users who access the website behave on it.

  3. Checking website traffic with Similarweb

  Similarweb is a website analysis tool that estimates the total traffic of any site on the internet. It is one of the best traffic checker tools for estimating how much web traffic 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 for easy comparison.

  

  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 continues checking website traffic estimates while the user is browsing the web.

  Similarweb is free to use, up to a point. However, to get the most out of this tool, you must upgrade to the premium plan, which starts at $125 per user per month.

  The price isn’t Similarweb’s only downside. Ultimately, it provides reasonably accurate estimates but is no match for a comprehensive traffic analytics tool.

  4. Checking website traffic with Semrush

  Semrush is a collection of marketing solutions for online businesses. Its Traffic Analytics tool checks the website traffic of up to 100 sites and compares that data side-by-side. For each site, it reveals the top pages, the regions from which most of the traffic comes, and the locations from which the most referrals come.

  Semrush also gathers insights into competitors’ audiences and their activity, especially activity that overlaps between the sites being checked. It extracts and analyses comprehensive data on organic and paid search, social media, and backlinks.

  

  However, there are notable downsides. Semrush can be pricey, with plans starting at about $119.95 per month or $1,199.40 annually. This cost may be prohibitive for smaller businesses or freelancers. Still, a free version offers most of the functionality but with a limited number of daily reports.

  5. Checking website traffic with Ahrefs

  Ahrefs‘s biggest strength is its organic traffic estimation capabilities. It estimates monthly visits from Google worldwide, Google keywords in the top 100 that a website ranks for, and traffic value via equivalence to PPC.

  

  Ahrefs bases its estimates on ranking data from a database of 12 billion keywords, which is why it is so powerful. It generates a detailed report that includes organic traffic estimates, backlink data, and top-performing keywords.

  However, the numbers produced by Ahrefs are estimates based on the available data and won’t always be 100% accurate. This is particularly true for smaller or newer websites that lack the data volumes needed for accuracy.

  It’s a great SEO marketing tool that’s free to use within certain limits, but there is some value in registering for a paid plan. There are several options, beginning with the $129 per month Lite plan and extending to the Enterprise Plan for $1,499 monthly.

  6. Checking website traffic with Serpstat

  Serpstat is an SEO solution that grew from a simple keyword research tool. It offers more comprehensive features to help businesses understand their website’s performance. It helps improve a site’s visibility through tools for rank tracking, keyword research, traffic checking, backlink analysis, and site auditing.

  

  It provides metrics like estimated monthly visits, traffic sources (organic, paid, and referral), and insights into top-performing pages. Serpstat also offers competitor analysis features that help to identify market trends and refine growth strategies. However, like Ahrefs, the numbers provided are estimates, which are only as good as the depth of data from which they are derived.

  The free version is fine for basic analysis, but signing up for one of the paid plans is advisable for commercial use. Pricing ranges from $59 per month to a monthly fee of $479 for the Agency plan. There is an option to pay annually at a discount.

  7. Checking website traffic with SEO PowerSuite

  SEO PowerSuite also goes some distance beyond just website traffic checking. As the name implies, it’s a suite of tools to improve website rankings.

  

  There are four tools in the suite :

  • Rank Tracker enables tracking a website’s search engine rankings across multiple keywords and search engines.
  • WebSite Auditor offers SEO analysis of website pages and recommends actions to boost performance.
  • SEO SpyGlass analyses a website’s backlink profile to highlight link-building possibilities that’d help improve performance.
  • LinkAssistant helps identify websites suitable for link-building and recommends viable outreach opportunities.

  SEO PowerSuite has a free plan and two premium plans with varying functionality. The monthly cost could be as much as $139.67, depending on the features needed. Annual pricing options are also available.

  8. Checking website traffic with Ubersuggest

  Ubersuggest is also an SEO-focused tool. It offers website traffic analysis, keyword rankings, backlink profiles, and competitor insights. These are packaged in reports that provide an overview of website traffic, including monthly organic traffic totals and the number of organic keywords the site ranks for. Ubersuggest also offers content suggestions.

  

  Like other tools in this category, Ubersuggest doesn’t collect comprehensive data, so its numbers are estimates. This means the accuracy can vary. However, it remains a solid choice for providing great insights and enhancing a website’s online presence.

  Like many tools in this category, there is a free version to give potential customers a taste, which is restricted by volume more than features. The paid plans range from around $29 per month for one website on the individual plan to about $99 per month for 8-15 websites on the Enterprise plan. Discounted annual pricing is also an option.

  9. Checking website traffic with MonsterInsights

  MonsterInsights is a tool worth considering for websites built on WordPress because it’s not a website checking tool in the usual sense. It’s a WordPress plugin that simplifies the task by integrating Google Analytics directly into a website.

  MonsterInsights then uses the raw data provided by GA4 to extract actionable insights based on audience preferences and activity. This makes it easier to focus on the relevant metrics for different types of websites. For example, the metrics used to measure a blog site would not be the same as those for an ecommerce site.

  But there are some downsides, too. While the basic version is free, it has limited features, and the most potent functionality requires a premium subscription. Those start at $249 per year for a single site, or the Pro plan at $499 for up to five sites. Agencies looking to work with up to 25 sites are in for $999.

  

  There’s another option

  Although many of these tools have free versions, those tend to be heavily restricted, and premium plans can be expensive. A website has to generate serious revenue to deliver a decent return on investment (ROI) to justify the costs.

  As more countries adopt GDPR-like privacy regulations, brands must ensure they’re using compliant, privacy-centric analytics tools.

  Matomo Analytics is one such tool. It’s an ethical, open-source solution that helps you collect accurate data about your website’s traffic and make more informed decisions. This enhances the customer experience and ensures GDPR compliance and user privacy.

  It’s completely free to install as an on-premise solution. Alternatively, there’s the subscription-based Matomo Cloud version.

  How to check website traffic on Matomo

  Apart from a better ROI picture, Matomo offers a more reliable assessment of your website’s traffic than Google Analytics 4. It also provides multiple ways to check organic search traffic :

  • Visits log report
  • Real-time visitor map
  • Visits in real-time report

  Let’s look at all of them one by one.

  The visits log report is a unique rundown of your site’s visitors. It offers a much more granular view than other traffic checker tools, which only show the total number of visitors for a given period.

  

  You can access the visits log report by clicking on the reporting menu and 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
  • The device they used to access your site

  It 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 shows site visitors’ location for a given timeframe. If you have an international website, it’s a fantastic way to see exactly where 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 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

  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 many of those mentioned here 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 records user behaviour differently, significant differences in website traffic reports between analytics platforms are usually due to 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. However, if users reject cookie consent banners, Google Analytics can’t track them. 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). Therefore, it can continue to track visitors even after they have rejected a cookie consent screen from Google Analytics. This means virtually all website traffic will be tracked regardless of whether users accept a cookie consent banner. And it’s why traffic reports in Matomo are often much higher than in Google Analytics.

  

  Around half (47.32%) of adults in the European Union refuse to allow personal data tracking for advertising purposes, and 95% of people will reject additional cookies when it is easy to do so. So relying on cookies limits your results — and causes you to miss out on valuable 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.

  What to do if website traffic levels drop

  Experiencing a drop in website traffic can be frustrating, but it happens to everyone at some point. Here’s how to address it :

  • Analyse traffic sources : Use analytics tools to pinpoint where the decline is coming from—organic search, referrals, or social media.
  • Check for technical issues : Look for broken links or slow loading times, which can deter visitors. Tools like Google Search Console can help identify errors.
  • Review recent changes : Consider any recent updates to the website. If something coincided with the drop, it might be worth reverting.
  • Evaluate content quality : Ensure the content is engaging and relevant. Update or improve underperforming posts.
  • Reassess the marketing strategy : The only constant in marketing is change. It’s wise to periodically revisit the balance between paid ads, social media and other vectors to evaluate their effectiveness and adjust the approach.

  It’s perfectly normal for website traffic volumes to fluctuate. Expect it and work with the available tools. Persistence will likely see the traffic volumes rebound.

  Get more accurate traffic reports with Matomo

  There are several methods to check website traffic. Some 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 check their website traffic accurately and ethically.

  Try Matomo for Free

  Start your 21-day free trial — no credit card required.

• 12 ways Matomo Analytics helps you to protect your visitor’s privacy

  5 mai 2020, par InnoCraft — Analytics Tips, Privacy, Security

  This post was originally published on January 11, 2017, and updated on May, 2020.

  At Matomo we think privacy matters. From the beginning, Matomo has had a strong focus on privacy and ensuring the privacy of your visitors and analytics data. 

  Here are some ways how you can ensure your users and visitors privacy by using Matomo (Piwik).

  1. Owning the data gives you power to protect user privacy

  Whether you host Matomo on-premises yourself, or whether you use Matomo’s cloud, YOU keep control of your data and nobody else. By knowing exactly where your data is stored and having full control over what happens to it, you have the power to protect your user’s privacy. No-one else can claim ownership. 

  2. GDPR compliance

  GDPR is one of the most important privacy laws to have come out in the last few years. As such, Matomo takes GDPR compliance very seriously. There’s even a 12-step checklist for you to follow to ensure your Matomo is GDPR compliant. Not only that Matomo is HIPAA, CCPA, LGPD, and PECR compliant.

  3. Data anonymization

  For better privacy by default, Matomo implements a range of data anonymization techniques. One of the main techniques is not recording the full IP address of your visitors. Some countries even require you to anonymize additional info considered Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

  To change the IP anonymization settings go to “Administration > Privacy”. 

  

  4. Configuring Matomo to not process personal data or personally identifiable information (PII)

  To further protect the privacy of your visitors, you can learn how to not process any personal information or PII. 

  5. Deleting old visitor logs

  The is important because visitor logs contain information all the collected raw data about every visitor and every action. You can configure Matomo to automatically delete logs from the database. When you delete old logs, only the real time and visitor log reports will no longer work for this old time period, all other aggregated reports will still work.

  For privacy reasons, we highly recommend that you keep the detailed Matomo logs for only 3 to 6 months and delete older log data. This has one other nice side effect : it will free significant database space, which will, in turn, slightly increase performance !

  

  6. Supporting the Do Not Track preference

  Do Not Track enables users to opt out of any tracking by websites they do not visit, including analytics services, advertising networks, and social platforms. By default, Matomo respects users preference and will not track visitors which have specified “I do not want to be tracked” in their web browsers. Get more information about DoNotTrack.

  To make sure Do Not Track is respected, go to “Administration => Privacy”.

  7. Including an Opt-Out Feature on your website or app

  By embedding the Opt-Out feature in your website, you give your visitors the possibility to opt-out of the tracking. When you go to “Administration > Privacy”, you will be able to copy and paste an HTML Iframe code to embed the opt-out feature for example into your privacy policy page or in your ‘Legal’ page. Your users can then click on a link to opt-out.

  On the Matomo Marketplace there are also some plugins available to customize the Opt-Out experience. For example AjaxOptOut and CustomOptOut.

  

  8. Disabling Live features

  The Real-Time, Visitor Log and Visitor Profile features give you insights into the tracked raw data by showing you details about every visitor and every action they performed. To protect the privacy of your visitors you may decide to prevent access to such features by disabling the “Live” plugin in “Administration => Plugins”. This way only aggregated reports will be shown in your Matomo.

  9. Disabling fingerprinting across websites

  By default, when one of your visitors visits several of your websites, Matomo will create a fingerprint for this user that will be different across the websites to increase the visitors’ privacy. You can make sure that this feature is disabled by going to “Administration => Config file” and verifying that the value of “enable_fingerprinting_across_websites” is set to zero.

  10. Disabling tracking cookies

  Matomo uses first-party cookies to store some information about visitors between visits. In some countries, the legislation requires websites to provide a way for users to opt-out of all tracking, in particular tracking cookies. You can disable cookies by adding one line in the Matomo Javascript code.

  11. Creating the tool of your dreams by developing your own plugins and getting access to the API

  Matomo is an open platform that lets you extend and customise the tracking ; reporting ; and user interface to your needs and to protect your visitors’ privacy the way you want or need it. Learn more in the Matomo Developer Zone. You may also have a look at our Matomo Marketplace where you can find several free and premium features to extend your Matomo.

  12. Transparency

  By default, all information and all collected data in your Matomo server are protected and nobody can access it. However, Matomo allows you to optionally make your collected data public and you can export any Matomo report including the whole dashboard to embed it into your website. This way you can show your users exactly which information you track. When you decide to make reports public, we do our best to protect privacy and automatically hide any Personally Identifiable Information such as the Visitor Profile and we make sure to not show any Visitor IP address and the Visitor ID.

  Bonus tip – A privacy policy template for you

  When you use Matomo to track your visitors, we recommend you update your Privacy Policy to explain how Matomo is used and what data it gathers. Here’s a Privacy Policy template for you to copy on your site.

  Continuous privacy improvements

  We are always interested in improving the privacy. If you miss any feature or have an idea on how to improve the privacy, please let us know.

  More information about all the Matomo features

  If you want to learn more about all the features in Matomo, have a look at our User Guides and FAQ entries.

• 6 Crucial Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimisation

  26 février 2024, par Erin

  Whether investing time or money in marketing, you want the best return on your investment. You want to get as many customers as possible with your budget and resources.

  That’s what conversion rate optimisation (CRO) aims to do. But how does it help you achieve this major goal ? 

  This guide explores the concrete benefits of conversion rate optimisation and how they lead to more effective marketing and ROI. We’ll also introduce specific CRO best practices to help unlock these benefits.

  What is conversion rate optimisation ?

  Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of examining your website for improvements and creating tests to increase the number of visitors who take a desired action, like purchasing a product or submitting a form.

  The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a specific goal.

  

  In order to improve your conversion rate, you need to figure out :

  • Where your customers come from
  • How potential customers navigate or interact with your website
  • Where potential customers are likely to exit your site (or abandon carts)
  • What patterns drive valuable actions like sign-ups and sales

  From there, you can gradually implement changes that will drive more visitors to convert. That’s the essence of conversion rate optimisation.

  6 top benefits of conversion rate optimisation (and best practices to unlock them)

  Conversion rate optimisation can help you get more out of your campaigns without investing more. CRO helps you in these six ways :

  1. Understand your visitors (and customers) better

  The main goal of CRO is to boost conversions, but it’s more than that. In the process of improving conversion rates, you’ll also benefit by gaining deep insights into user behaviour, preferences, and needs. 

  Using web analytics, tests and behavioural analytics, CRO helps marketers shape their website to match what users need.

  Best practices for understanding your customer :

  First, analyse how visitors act with full context (the pages they view, how long they stay and more). 

  In Matomo, you can use the Users Flow report to understand how visitors navigate through your site. This will help you visualise and identify trends in the buyer’s journey.

  

  Then, you can dive deeper by defining and analysing journeys with Funnels. This shows you how many potential customers follow through each step in your defined journey and identify where you might have a leaky funnel. 

  

  In the above Funnel Report, nearly half of our visitors, just 44%, are moving forward in the buyer’s journey after landing on our scuba diving mask promotion page. With 56% of potential customers dropping off at this page, it’s a prime opportunity for optimising conversions.

  Think of Funnels as your map, and pages with high drop-off rates as valuable opportunities for improvement.

  Once you notice patterns, you can try to identify the why. Analyse the pages, do user testing and do your best to improve them.

  2. Deliver a better user experience

  A better understanding of your customers’ needs means you can deliver a better user experience.

  

  For example, if you notice many people spend more time than expected on a particular step in the sign-up process, you can work to streamline it.

  Best practices for improving your user experience : 

  To do this, you need to come up with testable hypotheses. Start by using Heatmaps and Session Recordings to visualise the user experience and understand where visitors are hesitating, experiencing points of frustration, and exiting. 

  You need to outline what drives certain patterns in behaviour — like cart abandonment for specific products, and what you think can fix them.

  

  Let’s look at an example. In the screenshot above, we used Matomo’s Heatmap feature to analyse user behaviour on our website. 

  Only 65% of visitors scroll down far enough to encounter our main call to action to “Write a Review.” This insight suggests a potential opportunity for optimisation, where we can focus efforts on encouraging more users to engage with this key element on our site.

  Once you’ve identified an area of improvement, you need to test the results of your proposed solution to the problem. The most common way to do this is with an A/B test. 

  This is a test where you create a new version of the problematic page, trying different titles, comparing long, and short copy, adding or removing images, testing variations of call-to-action buttons and more. Then, you compare the results — the conversion rate — against the original. With Matomo’s A/B Testing feature, you can easily split traffic between the original and one or more variations.

  

  In the example above from Matomo, we can see that testing different header sizes on a page revealed that the wider header led to a higher conversion rate of 47%, compared to the original rate of 35% and the smaller header’s 36%.

  Matomo’s report also analyses the “statistical significance” of the difference in results. Essentially, this is the likelihood that the difference comes from the changes you made in the variation. With a small sample size, random patterns (like one page receiving more organic search visits) can cause the differences.

  If you see a significant change over a larger sample size, you can be fairly certain that the difference is meaningful. And that’s exactly what a high statistical significance rating indicates in Matomo. 

  Once a winner is identified, you can apply the change and start a new experiment. 

  3. Create a culture of data-driven decision-making

  Marketers can no longer afford to rely on guesswork or gamble away budgets and resources. In our digital age, you must use data to get ahead of the competition. In 2021, 65% of business leaders agreed that decisions were getting more complex.

  CRO is a great way to start a company-wide focus on data-driven decision-making. 

  Best practices to start a data-driven culture :
  

  Don’t only test “hunches” or “best practices” — look at the data. Figure out the patterns that highlight how different types of visitors interact with your site.

  Try to answer these questions :

  • How do our most valuable customers interact with our site before purchasing ?
  • How do potential customers who abandon their carts act ?
  • Where do our most valuable customers come from ?

  Moreover, it’s key to democratise insights by providing multiple team members access to information, fostering informed decision-making company-wide.

  4. Lower your acquisition costs and get higher ROI from all marketing efforts

  Once you make meaningful optimisations, CRO can help you lower customer acquisition costs (CAC). Getting new customers through advertising will be cheaper.

  As a result, you’ll get a better return on investment (ROI) on all your campaigns. Every ad and dollar invested will get you closer to a new customer than before. That’s the bottom line of CRO.

  Best practices to lower your CAC (customer acquisition costs) through CRO adjustments :

  The easiest way to lower acquisition costs is to understand where your customers come from. Use marketing attribution to track the results of your campaigns, revealing how each touchpoint contributes to conversions and revenue over time, beyond just last-click attribution.

  You can then compare the number of conversions to the marketing costs of each channel, to get a channel-specific breakdown of CAC.

  This performance overview can help you quickly prioritise the best value channels and ads, lowering your CAC. But these are only surface-level insights. 

  You can also further lower CAC by optimising the pages these campaigns send visitors to. Start with a deep dive into your landing pages using features like Matomo’s Session Recordings or Heatmaps.

  They can help you identify issues with an unengaging user experience or content. Using these insights, you can create A/B tests, where you implement a new page that replaces problematic headlines, buttons, copy, or visuals.

  

  When a test shows a statistically significant improvement in conversion rates, implement the new version. Repeat this over time, and you can increase your conversion rates significantly, getting more customers with the same spend. This will reduce your customer acquisition costs, and help your company grow faster without increasing your ad budget.

  5. Improve your average order value (AOV) and customer lifetime value (CLV)

  CRO isn’t only about increasing the number of customers you convert. If you adapt your approach, you can also use it to increase the revenue from each customer you bring in. 

  But you can’t do that by only tracking conversion rates, you also need to track exactly what your customers buy.

  If you only blindly optimise for CAC, you even risk lowering your CLV and the overall profitability of your campaigns. (For example, if you focus on Facebook Ads with a $6 CAC, but an average CLV of $50, over Google Ads with a $12 CAC, but a $100 CLV.)

  Best practices to track and improve CLV :

  First, integrate your analytics platform with your e-commerce (B2C) or your CRM (B2B). This will help you get a more holistic view of your customers. You don’t want the data to stop at “converted.” You want to be able to dive deep into the patterns of high-value customers.

  The sales report in Matomo’s ecommerce analytics makes it easy to break down average order value by channels, campaigns, and specific ads.

  

  In the report above, we can see that search engines drive customers who spend significantly more, on average, than social networks — $241 vs. $184. But social networks drive a higher volume of customers and more revenue.

  To figure out which channel to focus on, you need to see how the CAC compares to the AOV (or CLV for B2B customers). Let’s say the CAC of social networks is $50, while the search engine CAC is $65. Search engine customers are more profitable — $176 vs. $134. So you may want to adjust some more budget to that channel.

  To put it simply :

  Profit per customer = AOV (or CLV) – CAC

  Example :

  • Profit per customer for social networks = $184 – $50 = $134
  • Profit per customer for search engines = $241 – $65 = $176

  You can also try to A/B test changes that may increase the AOV, like creating a product bundle and recommending it on specific sales pages.

  An improvement in CLV will make your campaigns more profitable, and help stretch your advertising budget even further.

  6. Improve your content and SEO rankings

  A valuable side-effect of focusing on CRO metrics and analyses is that it can boost your SEO rankings. 

  How ? 

  CRO helps you improve the user experience of your website. That’s a key signal Google (and other search engines) care about when ranking webpages. 

  

  For example, Google’s algorithm considers “dwell time,” AKA how long a user stays on your page. If many users quickly return to the results page and click another result, that’s a bad sign. But if most people stay on your site for a while (or don’t return to Google at all), Google thinks your page gives the user their answer.

  As a result, Google will improve your website’s ranking in the search results.

  Best practices to make the most of CRO when it comes to SEO :

  Use A/B Testing, Heatmaps, and Session Recordings to run experiments and understand user behaviour. Test changes to headlines, page layout, imagery and more to see how it impacts the user experience. You can even experiment with completely changing the content on a page, like substituting an introduction.

  Bring your CRO-testing mindset to important pages that aren’t ranking well to improve metrics like dwell time.

  Start optimising your conversion rate today

  As you’ve seen, enjoying the benefits of CRO heavily relies on the data from a reliable web analytics solution. 

  But in an increasingly privacy-conscious world (just look at the timeline of GDPR updates and fines), you must tread carefully. One of the dilemmas that marketing managers face today is whether to prioritise data quality or privacy (and regulations).

  With Matomo, you don’t have to choose. Matomo values both data quality and privacy, adhering to stringent privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA.

  Unlike other web analytics, Matomo doesn’t sample data or use AI and machine learning to fill data gaps. Plus, you can track without annoying visitors with a cookie consent banner – so you capture 100% of traffic while respecting user privacy (excluding in Germany and UK).

  And as you’ve already seen above, you’ll still get plenty of reports and insights to drive your CRO efforts. With User Flows, Funnels, Session Recordings, Form Analytics, and Heatmaps, you can immediately find insights to improve your bottom line.

  And our built-in A/B testing feature will help you test your hypotheses and drive reliable progress. If you’re ready to reliably optimise conversion rates (with accuracy and without privacy concerns), try Matomo for free for 21 days. No credit card required.

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