We talk to a lot of businesses and often they believe they have much higher traffic than they really do. This can be for multiple reasons:
- Analytics programs that include hits from bots; Google Analytics does not include these hits and is much more accurate.
- Web companies that inflate the hit count with various methods.
- A misunderstanding of the analytics data.
Free Sites That Allow You to Get a Better Estimate of Real Traffic Data
Compete – http://siteanalytics.compete.com
With compete you can look at a graph that shows you how much traffic you have had each month for up to the last two years. Enter your domain and look at the “Unique Visitors” – this is an accurate representation of the hits you are getting from actual humans.
Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics
Add it to your site and find out how much traffic your website is really getting. The truth is the only number you need is how many real hits you are getting from people. Google Analytics offers so much more such as which sites people came from, which keyword they found your site for, the geographic location of your visitors, which pages were viewed the most, the # of page views you had, your bounce rate…I could go on and on.
Google Analytics is used so much because you can trust the numbers. USE IT!
SEMRush – http://www.semrush.com
SEMRush offers you a cool bit of data “Google SE Traffic – Estimated number of visitors coming from the first 20 Google search results (per month)” – This is a nice bit of data.
I Do Not Want to Burst Your Traffic Bubble…
But you have to know the truth to truly understand how healthy your web presence really is. Also, keep in mind that some toolbars and programs will increase your traffic numbers and percentages by counting all your own hits to your website. If you are working on your site a lot or checking it on it many times daily those are not true hits! Use resources that will give you an honest representation of your traffic.
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