5 Ways to Find Number of Visitors to a Website
Generally web traffic is defined in two terms for a specific period – page views and unique visits. The number of unique human visitors who visits a website is referred as unique visits while the total pages viewed is called page views. This shouldn’t include bots that crawl your website for various purposes, such as for search engine ranking and data gathering. There are many tools that you can use to find insights of the traffic data of a website. Using these tools, you can get an approximate amount of visitors that any website is attracting for a specific period of time.
Fortunately, these tools are easy to use and you can use these tools to analyze your competitors. You will know how much traffic prominent websites in your niche get. It’s easier to know what works and what doesn’t, after you add new features to your website. It will be helpful for marketers, SEO specialists and website administrators to get accurate information about daily, weekly or monthly sessions that a website is getting. These tools could also provide information about current top keywords in specific niche. By using these keywords, you can drive more traffic to your website.
There are other metrics that you can measure with these tools, such as page views per visit, time spend on a webpage, bounce rate and others. Because there are many traffic estimation tools out there, you should choose the one that works best for you.
1. Semrush – Any Website
Semrush is also known for its exceptional accuracy and it’s a reliable tool to check the traffic of a website. It has a trend following among the webmasters and bloggers community. If you know how to utilize Semrush, you should be able to derive plenty of value from it. Go to Semrush site, enter the site URL in search box, choose the country and hit enter. The domain overview will show the details of traffic on desktop and mobile devices.
Semrush provides you with a list of ranked keywords and key phrases. You can use this information to effectively improve the number of unique visitors. Free users can get basic data, while the paid version offers you full analysis of the traffic that you website and competitors are getting. For commercial website owners and professional bloggers, the paid version is all worth it. You can immediately make crucial decisions that have an effect on your incoming traffic.
Semrush also offer a new Traffic Analytics tool that will help you to find the traffic details of your competitors. You can register for a free account to get 10 traffic overview reports per day. You can use this tool to find how many visitors are viewing your competitor’s site to improve your site’s performance.
2. SimilarWeb – Any Website
Go to SimilarWeb website, enter any site URL in the search box and hit enter. You will see detailed traffic analysis for the previous month. This includes ranking, sources, total visits, traffic by countries and more. Go to the traffic overview section which will show you the approximate number of visitors for the past six months.
SimilarWeb is a useful tool for new bloggers, because it breaks down traffic sources based on different factors, such as device used and keywords. Paid version of SimilarWeb offers even more information, including mobile app engagement, campaign effectiveness benchmark, most popular pages and others. SimilarWeb collects data with browser extensions and toolbars, so information can be obtained from a sample of users. However, accuracy could depend on your categories.
3. Alexa – Any Website
The free Alexa tool does not show the estimated number of visitors. But it shows the global rank and country rank in which the site is popular. This will give you an overview of traffic comparing to any other website. You can use “https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/domain-name” to find the traffic details of any website. Ensure to replace the “domain-name” with the site name you want to find the traffic data.
The premium version of Alexa is also useful for comparing traffic and general trends of multiple websites. It’s known for massive index when comparing different websites in a niche. However, Alexa isn’t so great for small websites and if you get fewer visitors each month, you won’t get any useful information. In some cases, a website with fewer visits has higher Alexa rank than those with higher visits. This is enough to question the reliability of the service. Although Alexa is useful for predicting future trends of a website, you may not be able to make any real use of the charts, in some situations.
4. Google Analytics [For Site Owners]
Google Analytics is the most popular website analysis tool on the planet. Almost every site uses Analytics tag to track traffic and other data. You should login and register your site with Analytics. A tracking code needs to be installed on your site to get the traffic data inside your Analytics account. Learn more about Google Analytics.
5. Quantcast [For Site Owners]
When you use Quantcast, information is displayed nicely and easy to follow. But you should signup and install the Quantcast tag on your site to use the service. It includes a useful media planner tool and some demographic information. However, Quantcast lacks enough information for websites with small traffic. Although the data may not be reliable for smaller website, it still provides some good information. Its demographics data can be used as references for many website owners and SEO professionals. Quantcast is free, so this is a good enough incentive for new bloggers.
Conclusion
Traffic analysis is important for business professionals, website owners, administrators, marketers and SEO specialists. Fortunately, traffic estimator and analysis service doesn’t have to cost a fortune, especially for new bloggers. You can try out any of the above services, to prove their worth and usefulness. If your business depends heavily on online traffic, you should be serious about internal analysis, benchmarking and competitor intelligence. Once you are comfortable with a service, you can always migrate to a paid version to get much more information and benefits. By comparing your website with the competitors and the industry in general, you can keep abreast of your online performance.
Remember all the above explained tools try to offer estimated traffic data of a site. So this is not an actual number of visitors to that site. Among all, Google Analytics is the best but applicable for site owners. So if you really need to know the traffic data of a website then request the site owners to share the data from their Google Analytics account.
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