How to Track Visitor Traffic on your WordPress Site?

There are several things a website owner must do to optimize their WordPress site. Content creation, website metric tracking, and improving web design are just a few examples. 

Metric tracking, in particular, is essential as it allows you to gain insights regarding your website. You can then use these insights to determine what direction to take to improve the platform. This information can help you analyze the behavior of your online visitors. 

Though there are a handful of metrics, visitor traffic is arguably one of the most important as it tells you how many people visited your site over a certain period. 

Visitor traffic also helps you determine whether what you’re doing is working or not. And often, website owners use this metric to create an appropriate optimization strategy. 

There are two ways to track and monitor the visitor traffic of a WordPress site: you either use an analytics tool or an audit tool.

#1 Website Analytics Tools

A website analytics tool is a platform that analyzes several elements of your website in real time. Google Analytics is the most popular website traffic analytics tool, though you can look for alternatives if you want something different. You can look through this great walkthrough for a list of alternatives. These tools generally have specific features, and these may include:

• Search engine optimization (SEO) analytics
• Website speed optimization
• Marketing analytics
• Product performance analytics
• Social media analytics

However, before you can track your visitor traffic on your WordPress site, you must first integrate the analytics tool into the WordPress platform. Below is a step-by-step guide on how to do this.

For the purposes of this guide, these steps will focus on the setup process of Google Analytics.

Let’s start with how you can set up Google Analytics on WordPress by installing a Plugin.

1. Go to your WordPress site admin page.
2. Click Plugins from the left sidebar and select Add New from the dropdown menu.
3. You’ll be taken to the Add Plugins page. On the search bar from the top-right corner of the page, type in ‘GA Google Analytics.’
4. Look for the item that was developed by Jeff Starr, and click Activate.

You now need two pieces of data, and you can get those with the following steps:

1. Open a browser and visit the Google Analytics site by clicking this link.
2. There should be a button on the site that says Get started today. Click it.

3. A new page will open. If you are currently logged in to a Google account, it’ll take you to the Analytics page. If not, you may have to sign in with your Google account first.
4. Click the Start measuring button.

5. On the next page, you’ll have to fill in a couple of forms. Here’s a look at each setup form and the corresponding details you may have to fill in:
   1. Account setup: Here, you need to set up the Google Analytics account, and you must fill in the account name and the data you want to share with the platform.
   2. Property setup: A property corresponds to the collection of data that comes from your account. To set up an Analytics property, you must come up with a name and specify your time zone and currency.
   3. About your business: You must then specify the details about your business, including the industry, business size, and your purpose for using Google Analytics. Examples of purposes include measuring customer engagement, optimizing the site experience, measuring lead generation, and more.

6. A popup window will appear containing the Google Analytics Terms of Service Agreement. Please read it thoroughly and click the I Accept button to proceed.

7. The website should redirect you to the Stream Setup. Under the Choose a platform section, select Web since you’ll be using Google Analytics on a WordPress website.

8. On the Setup data stream section, enter your Website URL and the Stream name.

9. The Web stream details window will appear. Under Stream details, you’ll find your Stream ID. Click the Copy icon to the right of it and paste it into your notepad.
10. Click the View tag instructions button that should be somewhere on your screen.

11. On the new window, there should be two tabs, namely, Install with a website builder and Install manually. Go to the Install manually tab.

12. There should be a code on that tab. Please copy the entire code and paste it into your notepad.

You now have the two pieces of data you need to set up Google Analytics. Now, you need to go back to your WordPress admin page. Here’s what you need to do next:

1. Go back to the GA Google Analytics settings page where you left off earlier.

Under Plugin Settings, there are three fields of particular importance: (1) GA Tracking ID field, (2) Tracking Method, and (3) Tracking Code Location.

2. Paste the Measurement ID you copied earlier to the GA Tracking ID field.
3. Paste the code you copied earlier into the box to the right of Tracking Code Location.
4. Set Tracking Method from Universal Analytics to Global Site Tag.

Now, when you visit the Google Analytics page and click Realtime or Home from the left sidebar, you’ll find a graph. The graph shows you the users that visited your website and other information about visitor traffic, such as the number of new users and engagement time.

#2 SEO Audit Tools

The second method is using an SEO audit tool. As the name implies, the tool performs an audit on the WordPress site to check for technical SEO issues. These may include broken links, 404 errors, duplicate articles, and missing resources. Though they can do several things, one particular feature audit tools have in common is Traffic Analytics. It allows you to check the traffic of a specified website, and users use it to check their competitor’s website performance.

You can use it for many other things, like, for example, tracking the visitor traffic of your WordPress site. You don’t have to set it up, so it’s much simpler, though not as in-depth.

Below are some of the most popular SEO audit tools on the market:

• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• GTMetrix
• Sitechecker Pro
• Google Search Console

In addition to the traffic, SEO audit tools can also monitor and track the following metrics:

• Average visit duration
• Bounce rate
• Pages per visit
• Total visits
• Unique visitors

To use the platform, you simply have to go to the website and type in the URL of your WordPress site. After a few seconds of processing, the platform should display the metrics.

Wrapping Up

Online visitor traffic is an important piece of data that reflects a website’s performance. That’s why an analytics and audit tool is often a must-have for a webmaster. Though it can be tricky and tedious to set it up, the insights it can bring are most definitely worth it. Not to mention you already have this guide to make it a lot easier. 

But keep in mind that apart from visitor traffic, you must also be wary of other website metrics, including your engagement time, bounce rates, customer feedback, comments, and so much more.