How to check website traffic - yours or someone else's

Team TeachWiki

Assessing site traffic and comparing your performance with competitors is a universal way to understand how interested people are in your resource. The accuracy of the indicator analysis depends on the selected web analytics system. In this article we will show you how to check the traffic of a website, yours or someone else’s, using various online tools.

Why check website traffic?

Website traffic data shows where visitors are coming from, how they interact with the site, and what digital marketing strategies are actually working. You need to check your traffic numbers regularly if you want to get more blog subscribers, more sales in your online store, or just improve your numbers.

What can you learn when you analyze competitors' traffic ? Lots of useful things, for example:

  • which pages and posts bring them the most traffic,

  • What keywords are your competitors ranking for?

  • which channels bring them the most traffic.

You can then use this information to increase traffic to your website and improve your content marketing and SEO strategy. Once you understand what brings traffic to your competitors, you can, for example, target the same keywords and topics and attract more visitors to your online resource.

In order not to look blindly at traffic indicators and not get confused in web analytics tools, you need to at least master SEO promotion a little. This will be useful not only for those who want to work as an SEO specialist , but also for marketers, content managers, and entrepreneurs. Moreover, SEO is not a secret science for the elite, but a specific set of knowledge that includes:

  • understanding of search engine algorithms,

  • knowledge of the basics of website optimization and promotion,

  • skills in working with analytics tools.

Having gained experience in this area, you will be able to bring your site to a leading position in Google and Yandex.

How to find out traffic to your site

The most reliable way to check site traffic is to connect your resource to an analytics system . Let's talk briefly about the two most popular systems.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that provides accurate and detailed information about users interacting with a website. It is used to track:

  • duration of sessions,

  • user data (age, gender, interests),

  • failure rates,

  • interests of the audience,

  • traffic channels to the site,

  • number of target actions performed by users,

  • behavior of visitors on the site,

  • sources of traffic to the site, etc.

To start using Google Analytics, you need to create an account. From it you can set up data collection on the site in two ways:

  • via the Google Analytics field in your CMS (content management system),

  • by embedding the tracking code in the site header (on each page).

For a more detailed description of how to do this, see the setup guide .

Price. Technically this is a free product. The free plan allows you to make up to 10 million visits per month (that is, interactions that send data to Google Analytics). This is more than enough for small and medium-sized businesses. The paid version of Google Analytics 360 costs $12,500/month.

Pros:

  • powerful functionality,

  • a lot of information about traffic and users is available for free,

  • provides user demographics, location, interests and more,

  • there is an “E-commerce” tool,

  • processes 145 data parameters,

  • there is real-time traffic data,

  • You can connect up to 100 websites.

Minuses:

  • The interface is not the easiest for beginners, it takes some time to learn,

  • Google Analytics premium plan is too expensive for small and medium businesses.

Yandex.Metrica

A popular web analytics service among Russian-speaking webmasters. It is used to measure website traffic and analyze user behavior. Using Yandex.Metrica you can:

  • find out resource traffic (traffic volumes);

  • evaluate the effectiveness of contextual advertising;

  • see where users come to the site from;

  • find out what people are looking for on your site;

  • obtain information about the characteristics of visitors;

  • track how quickly site visitors leave;

  • obtain video recordings of the actions of individual visitors;

  • collect statistics for each ad in Yandex Direct.

How to find out website traffic in Yandex.Metrica? You need to install a special counter on your website. The counter accumulates information about where visitors come from, what characteristics they have, and what actions they perform.

Cost: free.

Pros:

  • there is a web viewer - a tool that records user actions;

  • there are “heat maps” of scrolling and clicks - a tool that demonstrates where users click;

  • you can segment users and study their behavior individually;

  • very accurately analyzes traffic to the site from Yandex;

  • Setting up goals here is easier than in Google Analytics;

  • It is easy for beginners to understand how the system works.

Minuses:

  • in general, Metrica has fewer functions than Google Analytics;

  • The choice of reports is smaller than in Google Analytics, which means there is less information for analysis.

If you are interested in understanding web analytics in more detail, competently reading and analyzing reports of traffic and user actions on the site, we recommend the courses from the table below.

How to check traffic to someone else's website

You can check the traffic of someone else’s website without connecting to analytics systems. Open online services allow you to do this. Most often, all you need to do is enter the URL of the site you want to check. Of course, the data will not be 100% accurate and not as complete as in Yandex Metrica and Google Analytics, but it is better than nothing, and you can get some useful information from the reports.

Remember that numbers and graphs alone may not tell you anything. Monitor traffic dynamics by month and analyze your competitors. For example, you see a steady increase in traffic to your site, and that's good. However, after checking the sites of your closest competitors, you realize that their traffic is also growing and the growth rate is faster than yours. This means that you need to take steps for SEO promotion , launch advertising in the context or target, or work with the content.

Any of these services can be used to check traffic to your own website if you do not have Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics connected. But we still recommend using analytics systems for your own website and clients’ websites, since data from online services may be inaccurate, their error sometimes reaching 30% .

Below is an overview of suitable online services that operate in the Russian Federation.

Similarweb

An online tool for comprehensive SEO analysis of websites, as well as checking the digital resources of competitors. Using Similarweb, they check promotion channels, website adaptability and other characteristics. For example:

  • the total volume of traffic on the site over the past 3 months,

  • comparison of traffic with competitors,

  • indicators of time spent on the site and the number of failures;

  • most visited pages;

  • traffic distribution across channels;

  • distribution by country and traffic source;

  • visual charts and graphs for all data.

Price. There is a free version (quite seriously stripped down compared to the paid one). The cost of the paid version is announced upon request; the most complete tariff starts from $167/month. It provides detailed information and shows in detail the dynamics of traffic, traffic sources and its localization.

Demo version: 7 days.

Pros:

  • clear interface,

  • shows search traffic by keywords,

  • analyzes competitor traffic and behavioral factors,

  • analyzes traffic by channel,

  • provides a geographic map of visitors,

  • analyzes search and advertising traffic of the site with detail,

  • analyzes the advertising activities of competitors.

Minuses:

  • The free plan has a fairly limited number of features,

  • there are inaccuracies in the data,

  • does not provide data for sites with fewer than 5,000 visits per month.

Tool to check website traffic

Free version

Free trial for premium plan

Monthly cost of paid plan

What is it best suited for?

Google Analytics

There is

-

$12,500/month

Get complete internal analytics of your own website for free

Yandex.Metrica

There is

-

-

Get complete internal analytics of your own website for free, without studying too deeply the features of the system interface

Similarweb

There is

yes (7 days)

from 167 $/month

Get a detailed and visual dashboard with a detailed analysis of your website or competitors
If you periodically analyze site traffic, you will be able to correct errors without delay and strengthen the position of your resource in search engines. Choose the tools that best suit your needs and combine them to get complete data at your fingertips.
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