How to make sense of website traffic in your analytics
Spotting an increase in your website traffic numbers in your analytics can feel reassuring. More visits must be a good thing right? More visitors should mean more interest, more opportunities and more results.
Sadly, this isn’t always the case. Have you seen your numbers go up but not seen a corresponding increase in interest and conversions? If so, you’re not alone. One of the easiest ways to misread website performance is to assume that higher traffic automatically means better performance.
Don’t get us wrong, sometimes it does. Sometimes it means your content is connecting with your intended audience, your search visibility is improving and more of the right people are finding you.
But sometimes the numbers are deceptive.
If your traffic has jumped suddenly, if one page is attracting unusual activity, or if your reports are telling a story that does not match what is happening commercially, it is well worth taking a closer look. Because not all traffic is useful, and not all of it is even human.
In this article we’ll explore why it’s important to be sure of your numbers, the most common reasons your numbers don’t match what you’re seeing in your business, and what you can do to ensure you can be confident in your data.
More traffic is only valuable if it is the right traffic
While there are often images shared on social media of website traffic increasing, traffic on its own is unlikely to achieve your business goals.
What matters is whether your website is attracting the people you actually want to reach, and whether those people are then taking the actions you want them to once they’ve landed on your site and worked their way around it.
These actions might mean making an enquiry, or downloading a report, or signing up to your newsletter, or booking a call. Depending on your business it might also mean spending time and moving through your website in a way which demonstrates real interest.
A rise in traffic with no corresponding rise in engagement, enquiries or conversions is generally a sign that the headline number is hiding something important. This is where context is particularly important.
A smaller volume of relevant traffic is usually more valuable than a large volume of visits from people who were never likely to engage in the first place. And that brings us to one of the most common reasons website data can be misleading.
What does quality website data look like?
Before we go further into bad data – what to look for and what it’s telling you, what should good analytics be able to help you understand? What you should be able to tell from your analytics account is:
- Are the right people (for your business) finding your site?
- Which pages are pulling their weight?
- Where are people losing interest?
- Which content is attracting attention but not action?
- Are visitors moving naturally towards your enquiry points, or dropping off before they get there?
This is where good website data is worth its weight in gold. It’s not about achieving the highest numbers necessarily but about being able to use it to shine a light on how people are experiencing your site and so where improvements can be made.g
Signs your traffic needs a second look
We’ve talked about suspicious patterns, but what do we mean by this? Two examples are:
- A sudden spike in traffic with no obvious cause.
- Unusually high traffic to a single page that is not matched by enquiries or downloads.
In addition, you might see things like traffic from unexpected locations, strange referral sources, or engagement patterns that are out of the ordinary without you having taken action to justify that. Sometimes your numbers might rise, but the quality of visits falls away. In general what this means is that things will look busy in your traffic reports but there’s no change in things commercially for you.
When any of the above occurs it’s worth making a note and keeping a watching brief before you make any decisions to change anything on your website as a result.
One reason your analytics may be misleading: bots
Bots are software programmes designed to carry out automated tasks. And while they’ve got a bit of a bad reputation they’re not all bad, some are perfectly legitimate. For instance, search engines use bots to crawl websites for content they can then serve to people in search results. Other bots meanwhile might power services like chat functions or monitoring tools.
However, as you’re probably aware – not all bots are helpful.
When it comes to your website bots can distort your analytics, create misleading patterns in your reporting and make it harder to understand what real visitors are doing. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) automatically excludes traffic from known bots and spiders, which is really helpful, but that doesn’t mean every odd pattern in your reports can be ignored. Crucially the key here is ‘from known bots and spiders’, there are plenty more which can slip through and cause havoc with your numbers.
If your reporting is being skewed by suspicious traffic, it becomes much harder to make confident decisions about your website because you might think a page is performing brilliantly when it’s not, this might cause you to leave it when it could actually do with enhancing, or to direct ads to it which don’t then convert as expected.
What happens when your traffic is is real, but results are weak?
Sometimes the issue is not that anything nefarious is happening, bots aren’t skewing your numbers and messing with your reporting, but there is a disconnect between your traffic traffic and experience.
The likelihood is that when your website is attracting visitors, but not giving them what they need next you’ll have solid traffic numbers but a low conversion rate.
There’s a number of reasons why this might be the case. Sometimes it could be because your messaging is too vague. Or your messaging might be strong but your calls to action are too weak. Alternatively, your service pages might be too broad in setting out what you do and the value you bring.
In none of these situations is the answer to solely focus on increasing traffic numbers. Before you do that you need to improve the quality of what’s on your website.
To do this you might need to tighten up your positioning – get more specific on what you do and why / how it helps your customers. Or you might need to improve your internal linking so it’s easier for people to find their way around, or improve the website’s design so it serves to guide people visually to taking the actions you want.
Drawing conclusions from your website data
Before making any big decisions based on your analytics, it is always worth checking a few basics.
- Check whether internal traffic is being filtered.
- Look at where your traffic is coming from and the pattern over time.
- Review which landing pages are receiving visits and whether those visits turn into meaningful actions.
And then it’s worth comparing with what’s happening by way of conversions. Is your business seeing more leads? Is your sales team having better quality conversations? Are you receiving more relevant enquiries?
Your website analytics can and should be a hugely valuable resource. If it’s raising more questions than answers though it might be time to call on additional support to help you separate noise from insight, and traffic from genuine opportunity. Or, have a read of our guide to website analytics, the ones which matter and those that don’t.
