I am surprised many clients and website owners do not even check their website traffic, or even know how to do so.  How can you do your marketing if you do not know what pages people are visiting and how they arrived there?  There are a couple ways to go about it.  Some are easy and some are just way too complicated.  I check mine every day but once a week is fine for the complicated version.

Google Analytics – Add a tracking code to your website and log in to Google Analytics. You will see a ton of information about your website.  Before you become overwhelmed and confused, click on the Aquisition Tab, and Overview.  Here you can see what other websites are sending you traffic, how many visitors arrived just from search, and direct {people just logging in your domain name to go there directly).  Honestly, the rest is a bit too much information.  It is probably good for people that might have excelled in Economics.

Google Console – This is another free source from Google.  I like to set it up with all the websites I build because there is a feature that tells Google to index all your pages and it shows up in search faster when you use this feature.  Here you can find out the keyword phrases people are using to get to your website, how many views, and how many clicks each of those keyword phrases are receiving.  If you are doing any search engine optimization this is a great tool to see how your efforts are working.

WordPress Jetpack – Since I design all websites in WordPress, I automatically install the Jetpack plugin. Along with the many other great features, if you hover over the Jetpack button in your administration panel and hit stats, you can view the page views and clicks on your pages. I think this is the simplest and easiest way to view traffic if you do not need to go into great detail, just a general overview.

The Secret Stash – I normally have the plugin Wordfence installed on all my websites. This is a plugin that keeps spammers and hackers out but did you know if you browse around there is a tab called “Live Traffic”?  If you filter out the results to just humans, you can see the page viewed, time, and location of your visitor.  They will not let you zoom in on the actual house in Maps (I tried), but you can see the actual town, state, and country of your visitors.  This is for those of you who like to stalk your visitors…:).  

There are other ways, such as viewing your visitors on your hosting account, but these are the ways I use.  I know many of you are just using your website for new clients to learn more about you and your services, but others depend on online marketing efforts for their business success, so it makes sense to see what is currently working. 

Hope this helps!  If you do not have any of this setup and want it, I can do it!