Getting to know how many visitors are visiting your site can help you gauge the performance of your content and how effective your website is overall, regardless of whether you run a blog, e-commerce platform, or a corporate website. Total visits: A metric frequently used in website analytics, total visits enables you to know how many times your website has actually been visited over a given time period.
In this article, we will take you through everything you need to know about total visits — from describing their significance, differences from other metrics, and how to use them to make your website more effective and help it achieve its business goals.
What are Total Visits?
Total visits (or total sessions) is the overall number of users that visit (or access your website). A visit or a session starts when a user enters your site and ends when the user leaves your site or after a period of no activity (for the most part after 30 minutes of inactivity). Total visits, importantly, count multiple visits from a single user. An example of this is that if a user will visit your website three times in a single day it will be counted as three separate visits.
This metric is critical because it provides an overall glimpse of how much traffic you’re receiving to your site over a certain span of time, usually over several days, weeks, or months.
Why Total Visits Matter
Website Performance Indicator
The overall visit count can be an indicator of how well your site is doing in terms of attracting and retaining users. Achieving a high volume of visits is often indicative of your content, products, or services resonating with your audience. Total visits in this case could have dropped if there are issues like bad content, lower marketing spending, or low interest in the website.
Content Popularity Assessment
Which pages on your site get the most visits when tracking total visits. If some blog posts, product pages or landing pages get more visits, chances are your audience finds that content useful. That allows you to optimize your content strategy by focusing on the topics or products that elicit more traffic.
Marketing Effectiveness
Total visits is another metric which reflects the performance of your marketing campaigns. Regardless of whether you’re driving traffic with SEO, paid ads, social media, or email marketing, total visits can summarize the results of those efforts. A spike in visits following a campaign means that you are effectively reaching your target audience with your marketing.
User Engagement
Total visits is a pretty simple metric, but when taken together with other data such as bounce rate, average session duration, and pages per visit, it can help you determine how engaged users are with your content. More visits along with a low bounce rate and longer sessions implies that users are finding value on your site and that they are getting closer to their end goals.
Business Growth
Your website will ultimately reflect its worth based on increasing traffic over time, which can help your business grow. The more visitors to a website the more chances of converting website visitors to customers, subscribers or leads. If there is a steady increase in total visits month over month, you can be sure that your site is gaining traction and can become profitable when you have the right strategies in place.
Total Visits VS Unique visitors
Total visits: why total visits are useful but often need to be split to total visits vs unique visitors Giving you two different angles on your website’s traffic.
Total Visits counts all visits, even if the same user has visited multiple times. It counts each session as a visit, so if a single user visited your site several times in one day, it would count as several visits.
Unique Visitors, on the other hand, tracks the number of individuals visiting your site. A unique visitor is counted only once, even if the same person visits your site multiple times.
If, for example, 10 people visit your site once each in a single day, it means your visits and unique visitors for that day will be 10:2. Just imagine, if you have 10 unique people visiting your site three times each, your visits sum up to 30 but unique visitors remain 10.
Familiarizing yourself with the differences between these two metrics can offer a more nuanced and detailed picture of your traffic trends. For example, if you have a high number of visits but you have a low number of unique visitors, it might mean that you have a small group of users who keep coming back, rather than attracting new users.
How To Track Total Visits
To reach this, you should use an analytics software like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or other website tracking platforms. These tools keep detailed reports on the performance of your website like the total visits, unique visitors, bounce rate, time duration to spend a session, and many such metrics which are important.
Once you integrate your analytics tool, total visits are visible in the “Acquisition” or “Audience Overview” segment. You may view the data by time periods (Daily, Weekly, or Monthly) to find trends and volatilities in the traffic over a period of time.
A Breakdown Of Factors Impacting Total Visits
There can be a number of reasons behind the number of total visits to your website. Some of these include:
SEO and Organic Traffic If your site ranks clear on search engines for the relevant keywords, you will get more organic traffic which also increase your total visits.
Paid Advertising Campaigns Paid advertising While you can run an ad campaigns using Google Ads, social media or other networks to bring people to your site, you only get 35% visits if you use a paid advertising campaign.
Social Media Share Adding content on social media channels, and having users share your links can also increase the visits to your website.
Seasonality Some websites face seasonality or spike for holidays and events. E-commerce sites will generally be busier around Black Friday or holiday shopping.
Website Speed & Accessibility Users leave a slow website or non-mobile-friendly website quickly, which adds to the total visits. If these visitors are to stay on your page, the user experience needs to be smooth and seamless.
Content Quality High-quality, engaging content encourages repeat visitors to your website. If users enjoy or find your content useful, they’re more likely to come back, resulting in an increase in your overall visits.
Total Visits: How To Use This Number To Optimize Your Website
Now that you track total visits and collect data, the next step is taking advantage of those informations to enhance your website performance. Here are some potential strategies:
Audit Popular Pages Find out what pages have the most visits and make sure they are 100% optimized Such improvements could include optimizing the page’s load time, improving content, adding calls-to-action, or incorporating multimedia elements.
Looking at Bounce Rates High bounce rates on well-visited pages indicates your visitors aren’t finding what they are looking for The solution: Focus on improving the content and/or user experience so users come back again.
Conversion-oriented Paying attention to the number of paying customers, subscribers, or whatever your goal might be By knowing where your traffic comes from and which pages are converting, you can optimize your site for better conversions.
Alter Your Marketing Strategy If total visits decline, it may be time to rethink your marketing strategy. From updating your SEO tactics, launching new ad campaigns, or expanding your social media efforts, use your traffic data to hone in on your tactics.
More Words
Total visits are the base metric for understanding how your website’s doing. Although it doesn’t reflect the complete picture of user behavior, it gives you fundamental ideas about how much traffic you are earning on your site, and how that traffic changes with time. Therefore, with the help of combining total visits with some other metrics, you can know how to attract and retain your users, optimize your website for a better experience, and drive your business.
