To start optimizing the site, you need to go through the preparatory stage. During this period, specialists usually draw up a resource development plan, and then think over the general concept, work on a business plan. You also need to determine the traffic of someone else's site in order to analyze the success of your competitors in this niche.
Attendance
Also called website traffic. It is determined by the number of real people who switched to the resource. It doesn't matter which page they were paying attention to.
In addition to the total number of people who visited your or someone else's site, you can collect data on the location of users, their age, gender, hobbies and more.
Analysis Basics
How to find out the website traffic statistics? If we are talking about your project, special services will help in this matter. If you are promoting in the Google search engine, thenyou need to use Google Analytics. Yandex has a Metrica service for this.
If you need "naked" numbers, you can simply install a counter on the site, which will be at the top or bottom of the page and indicate the number of visits. However, you will not be able to study more specific traffic metrics.
Services from Google and Yandex
You can determine the site traffic using the above-mentioned services. In general, they collect not only traffic data, but also work to calculate other important parameters for optimization: conversion, page popularity, keyword performance, etc.
In order for these resources to work and help determine site traffic, you need to place the code of a particular program in the body of the resource code. Experts advise inserting both counters in order to analyze two analytics at once. If you are not going to promote in Yandex, you can use GA.
Code setting
In order for a resource to start collecting analytics from the entire site, you need to go to it and register. It is best to put the name of the project in the first column. Next, write the name of the site, and then indicate its address and time zone.
Now go to the main page of Google Analytics. A gear icon will be available in the lower left corner. You need to click on it to go to the service settings. Here we look at the column "Resource". In it we find the line "Tracking". Click on it to make the code available to us. The service will providecode you can:
- Copy to notepad and give to a programmer who knows where to install it.
- Use the appropriate plugin, which will install the code itself.
- Manually install.
To determine site traffic, you can install the GA code yourself. To do this, you need to insert it as the first element in the section of each page. Remember that resources that have a counter will collect statistics for you. Therefore, immediately decide for yourself which pages you need to collect data from and which not. Experts recommend not using the code in the "Administrator", since only the owner of the site can see it.
Data will appear in the service in 6-12 hours. After that, it will be possible to start collecting statistics.
How to work with GA
How to find out the traffic of the site page? This is pretty easy to do. We return to the main page of the service, which shows the graph. Here you can see how many users came today, explore bounce rate and session duration.
To get more detailed information, you need to select the "Reports" section on the left. Here you can view real-time traffic data. More graphs and numbers will appear. In general, there is nothing difficult here, since Google clearly signs each of them.
In the "Overview" tab, you can see general information about users who are currently on the site. Then you can analyze their location, traffic sources,the pages they are on, events (you need to set them yourself) and conversion.
There is also an audience analysis on the side. Here you can not only determine the site traffic, but also learn more about your users. For example, what country or city they are in, what browser, operating system or ISP they are using.
Cheat
How to determine the cheating of site traffic? If we are talking about someone else's resource, then only intuitively. You will have to look at different services indicators, reader activity and other factors. But you still won't get comprehensive answers.
But with cheating on your own site, things are easier. To do this, you will again have to turn to Google Analytics. Here you will need to see all reports by audience. What should I pay attention to?
In general, it all depends on the individual site. For example, you may notice that at some point the number of visitors increased dramatically. Next, choose the period in which such an anomaly began, and look at the sources, bounce rates, browsing depth and time on the site. All data must be true.
For example, if you see on a graph or table that several visitors in a row only went to the main page, stayed there for 5 minutes, and then explored another 5 pages, then think about whether this could be a coincidence.
You will also have to research search terms. As a rule, ordinary users do not formulate them precisely. Sometimes they make grammatical mistakes, write very long sentences.
Robots can also click through to requests that are somewhere at the very bottom of the list, which is hardly possible for ordinary visitors. Finally, suspicious sites can serve as referral sources.
Competitors
How to determine the attendance of a competitor's website? There are not many options here, and the results may not be accurate. However, traffic can be determined using counters and special services.
Why do you need to do this? First, when you decide to start a business on the Internet, you should analyze your competitors anyway. It's always better to learn from the mistakes of others. In addition, you can learn something interesting and adopt it.
How to determine the number of visits
To do this, you can use counters and special services. Counters are site widgets that can indicate the number of resource users. Most often they refer to statistical data, and do not indicate any analytics.
The most popular counters are Rambler, Bigmir or Mail. Ru. It should be said right away that they are almost never installed on commercial resources. Now they can be found on information and news sites.
They indicate the number of users for the year, month, week and today. Sometimes they show the number of visitors online in real time. If the site owner winds up traffic, then the data from the counters will be false.
If you foundcounter on the page, just click on it and get statistics. Sometimes it is partially open, so not all data can be retrieved.
Resources
You can also find out the attendance of a competitor's website using special resources:
- SE Ranking.
- SEMrush.
- Serpstat.
These are the most popular services that help collect statistics, even provide some analytical data.
SE Ranking is a popular resource that not only helps to check traffic, but also performs a huge number of other tasks: compiling a semantic core, clustering, marketing plan, SEO audit and much more.
By analyzing traffic, you can get data on organic and paid issuance, find out the keywords for which a competitor is moving, etc.
SEMrush is also a partially paid resource that provides a huge number of options for website analytics (yours and a competitor). Here you can define common and unique keywords. All information is clearly visualized, turning into graphs.
Serpstat is a service that performs many tasks: it can analyze keywords, paid search results and content, monitor positions, research the market, and audit the site.
Thanks to this resource you can find direct competitors and analyze their performance. For these purposes, it is convenient to use the "Comparison of domains" option, researching keywords andpositions. You can also find the most popular competitor pages to study their success.
