How to find website traffic
How to find website traffic
Check Website Traffic: Use These 10 FREE Tools To Find Traffic Of ANY Website In The World [Updated List]
Product Name: Traffic Estimator Tools
Summary
Estimating traffic of a website can help you with so many things including analysing a site for their best performing posts to money making posts. Here’s a list of few incredible free tools you can use to check traffic of any website in the world.
Are you looking for the little known ways to spy on the traffic of competitors websites? Do you want to know how much traffic a top blog in your niche gets? Searching for the best free website traffic checker tools? If yes, you’re in the right place.
Checking website traffic of your competitors is an effective way to find out what’s working and what’s not working on any niche.
You can’t build a profitable blog without actually increasing your traffic. Knowing your competitors traffic sources can help you come up with new ideas that you never thought of.
What Is Website Traffic?
Website traffic refers to users who visit a website. The main traffic channels for any website are organic, email, social media, referral, paid ads, and direct traffic.
Website traffic is often measured in “sessions”, also known as visits in traffic checker tools like Google Analytics. Your website traffic is determined by the number of people visiting your website pages. Visits, page views, clicks are all part of the “website traffic”.
If you want to see your own website traffic, you can use various tools like Google analytics, Monster Insights etc but if you want to check other people’s blog traffic you have to use some tools. Today, I’m going to share a few effective tools to find website traffic report of any of your competitor website for FREE.
Why Check Website Traffic Of Your Competitors?
You may ask, why do I even need to find website traffic of my competitors? Here are few benefits of estimating traffic or unique monthly visitors of your competitor websites.
What Statistics To Consider When Checking Website Traffic?
So what data should you consider while checking traffic of any website (including yours)?
Here are some of the most important website traffic statistics you should pay attention to.
Although you can’t find all the above statistics using free website checker tools but you can certainly get a better idea from premium SEO tools like Semrush.
How To Check Traffic On Your Own Website?
The best way to check your own website traffic is to use Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a free web analytics service that helps you analyze your website traffic and visitor behavior. Using Google Analytics, you can find a ton of things including;
Here’s how Google Analytics data looks like;
As you can see, you can easily find the total users who visited your site along with other details like bounce rate, session duration, active users, and so on.
You can also find your traffic sources along with the countries where your audience is coming from.
As you can see above, you can find your website traffic channels and find out whether your site is getting traffic from Google, social media, or other channels.
If you are looking for different tools to check website traffic for free, don’t skip this post, let’s find out those tools now.
FREE Website Traffic Checker
With The HOTH’s Free Website Traffic Checker Tool powered by SEMrush, you can estimate traffic statics about your domain including keyword count, organic traffic, organic cost, and more! Enter up to 25 URL’s in the box, each on a separate line, and compare stats between each.
Get an analysis into your SEO, competitors, industry, and a roadmap to move forward with. Schedule a time to receive your report.
How To Use This Tool
This tool is a great way to get quick data on how your website is performing as compared to others. Not only will it estimate your site’s traffic, but it’ll provide you with rankings, keyword counts, and how much you’re spending on Adwords.
From an SEO perspective, you should always be tracking your traffic to know whether your efforts are paying off. The same goes for being aware of how many keywords you’re ranking for.
In this section, we’re going to cover how to use The HOTH’s FREE Website Traffic Checker.
Once the tool loads up, enter your URL in the space.
The next step is to click on “View SEMrush Stats” and your results will appear below.
As you can see above, you get handy traffic data in a few seconds. But, you also have the ability to enter multiple URLs to compare your site against others.
Here is an example of generating a report on hoth.com along with other top SEO sites on the web.
In the top right-hand corner, you’ll see two buttons allowing you to download or print the results for later reference.
Normally, you would have to pay for expensive SEO software to get this data, but we’re offering it to you for FREE!
Video Walk Through
We offer video walkthroughs of all our free tools. Check out this video below to hear from one of our account managers about using the FREE Website Traffic Checker.
And while you’re on our YouTube channel, take a look at all of our free tools you can access directly from The HOTH. It’s even easier to find these tools if you sign up for a free account with us.
What Is Website Traffic?
If you’re new to SEO, we want to make sure you understand what we mean by website traffic before using this tool.
You’ve probably figured out by now website traffic is the number of people who visit your site. It’s typically measured in visitors per month.
There’s an important distinction when it comes to website traffic: organic vs. paid.
Organic traffic is all of the traffic you receive naturally. You can boost the amount of organic traffic by optimizing your site’s SEO.
The other type of traffic is paid and this has to do with Google Ads. In this realm, you design different kinds of ads to appear on Google (search, display, or video, for example) and bid on their placement.
Keywords are also significant in both types of traffic.
Keep in mind that not all website visitors are the same. Some have reached your site accidentally and won’t stay long. Others want to learn more about your products or services, or make a purchase.
Here are the four types of web traffic:
Once you use our free tool to estimate your total traffic, you can work on separating it into these four types of web traffic to see what you receive the most.
Factors That Influence Web Traffic
Now that you understand what website traffic is and how to use our FREE Website Traffic Checker tool, let’s get into the factors that can influence your traffic.
The first and most well-known is search engine ranking, meaning what position your site appears in a Google search.
Ideally, you want to be on the first page of search results but some companies need to do a little SEO work to get there. The higher your ranking the easier it’ll be for potential customers to find you.
Did you know that your site’s layout and loading time can also affect the traffic? Outdated or confusing layouts frustrate visitors to the point where they’ll just leave. The same goes for pop-ups or advertisements.
Loading time is also important. Online visitors have grown accustomed to sites that load fast and clear. Having to wait extra time for a site to load drives visitors away.
The last influencing factor we’ll mention is content. Your content should include high-performing keywords to boost your SEO and be written to bring value to visitors. When done right, people will start visiting your site to learn new things or have their questions answered.
Why Is Traffic Important
As a business owner or manager you’ve spent time, effort, and money on building a killer website. Chances are you’ve also invested in SEO optimization. You did all of this because you want people to actually visit your site.
Traffic is important because it means extra eyes on your content, products, or services. In turn, you’ll be able to generate more leads or make extra sales when more people are visiting your site.
If your traffic is low that means potential customers aren’t finding you. And, in turn, that means lost profit.
Website traffic is also a Google ranking factor. Google will assume that sites with higher traffic are in higher demand and therefore they’ll rank it higher.
What To Do With The Results
There are so many strategic moves you can make with this data.
First, see how your keywords are ranking as compared to your competitors. If they’re doing better than you, it may be worth conducting a competitive analysis to see what new keywords you can add to your playbook.
These keywords can be added to your web pages (that’s called on-page SEO) or they can be incorporated into blogs that attract visitors.
Not every online business uses Google Ads but if they do it’s helpful knowing the Adwords Traffic vs. Adwords Cost.
The free data from our tool will show you if the traffic you’re getting from ads is worth the cost. If not, you may want to reevaluate your ad strategy. Paid advertising can get expensive so you should monitor it regularly.
Do you need help coming up with your next SEO moves? Simply book a call with one of our experts to discuss your goals and we can help you out.
5 Ways to Find Number of Visitors to a Website
Generally web traffic is defined in two terms for a specific period – page views and unique visits. The number of unique human visitors who visits a website is referred as unique visits while the total pages viewed is called page views. This shouldn’t include bots that crawl your website for various purposes, such as for search engine ranking and data gathering. There are many tools that you can use to find insights of the traffic data of a website. Using these tools, you can get an approximate amount of visitors that any website is attracting for a specific period of time.
Fortunately, these tools are easy to use and you can use these tools to analyze your competitors. You will know how much traffic prominent websites in your niche get. It’s easier to know what works and what doesn’t, after you add new features to your website. It will be helpful for marketers, SEO specialists and website administrators to get accurate information about daily, weekly or monthly sessions that a website is getting. These tools could also provide information about current top keywords in specific niche. By using these keywords, you can drive more traffic to your website.
There are other metrics that you can measure with these tools, such as page views per visit, time spend on a webpage, bounce rate and others. Because there are many traffic estimation tools out there, you should choose the one that works best for you.
How to Find Traffic Data of A Website?
Use the below tools to find traffic data, that is number of visitors to a website:
1. Semrush – Any Website
Semrush is also known for its exceptional accuracy and it’s a reliable tool to check the traffic of a website. It has a trend following among the webmasters and bloggers community. If you know how to utilize Semrush, you should be able to derive plenty of value from it. Go to Semrush site, enter the site URL in search box, choose the country and hit enter. The domain overview will show the details of traffic on desktop and mobile devices.
Semrush provides you with a list of ranked keywords and key phrases. You can use this information to effectively improve the number of unique visitors. Free users can get basic data, while the paid version offers you full analysis of the traffic that you website and competitors are getting. For commercial website owners and professional bloggers, the paid version is all worth it. You can immediately make crucial decisions that have an effect on your incoming traffic.
Semrush also offer a new Traffic Analytics tool that will help you to find the traffic details of your competitors. You can register for a free account to get 10 traffic overview reports per day. You can use this tool to find how many visitors are viewing your competitor’s site to improve your site’s performance.
2. SimilarWeb – Any Website
Go to SimilarWeb website, enter any site URL in the search box and hit enter. You will see detailed traffic analysis for the previous month. This includes ranking, sources, total visits, traffic by countries and more. Go to the traffic overview section which will show you the approximate number of visitors for the past six months.
SimilarWeb is a useful tool for new bloggers, because it breaks down traffic sources based on different factors, such as device used and keywords. Paid version of SimilarWeb offers even more information, including mobile app engagement, campaign effectiveness benchmark, most popular pages and others. SimilarWeb collects data with browser extensions and toolbars, so information can be obtained from a sample of users. However, accuracy could depend on your categories.
3. Google Analytics [For Site Owners]
Google Analytics is the most popular website analysis tool on the planet. Almost every site uses Analytics tag to track traffic and other data. You should login and register your site with Analytics. A tracking code needs to be installed on your site to get the traffic data inside your Analytics account. Learn more about Google Analytics.
4. Quantcast [For Site Owners]
When you use Quantcast, information is displayed nicely and easy to follow. But you should signup and install the Quantcast tag on your site to use the service. It includes a useful media planner tool and some demographic information. However, Quantcast lacks enough information for websites with small traffic. Although the data may not be reliable for smaller website, it still provides some good information. Its demographics data can be used as references for many website owners and SEO professionals. Quantcast is free, so this is a good enough incentive for new bloggers.
5. Alexa – Any Website (Retired)
The free Alexa tool does not show the estimated number of visitors. But it shows the global rank and country rank in which the site is popular. This will give you an overview of traffic comparing to any other website. You can use “https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/domain-name” to find the traffic details of any website. Ensure to replace the “domain-name” with the site name you want to find the traffic data.
The premium version of Alexa is also useful for comparing traffic and general trends of multiple websites. It’s known for massive index when comparing different websites in a niche. However, Alexa isn’t so great for small websites and if you get fewer visitors each month, you won’t get any useful information. In some cases, a website with fewer visits has higher Alexa rank than those with higher visits. This is enough to question the reliability of the service. Although Alexa is useful for predicting future trends of a website, you may not be able to make any real use of the charts, in some situations. Note that Alexa retired their both free and premium services effective from 1st May 2022.
Conclusion
Traffic analysis is important for business professionals, website owners, administrators, marketers and SEO specialists. Fortunately, traffic estimator and analysis service doesn’t have to cost a fortune, especially for new bloggers. You can try out any of the above services, to prove their worth and usefulness. If your business depends heavily on online traffic, you should be serious about internal analysis, benchmarking and competitor intelligence. Once you are comfortable with a service, you can always migrate to a paid version to get much more information and benefits. By comparing your website with the competitors and the industry in general, you can keep abreast of your online performance.
Remember all the above explained tools try to offer estimated traffic data of a site. So this is not an actual number of visitors to that site. Among all, Google Analytics is the best but applicable for site owners. So if you really need to know the traffic data of a website then request the site owners to share the data from their Google Analytics account.
17 Ways To Find Out How Much Traffic a Website or Blog Gets
There are numerous reasons you might want to find out how much traffic a website or a blog gets. Perhaps you are interested in researching websites that compete in the same niche as a website you own.
Maybe you are considering starting a new blog, and you want to research the niche to see if there is enough interest in the topic for your new website to be viable. Perhaps you want to grow the traffic to a blog that you own by replicating and bettering the content that your competitors have. Maybe you’re curious about how much traffic some of the big media publishers’ websites get. Or maybe you’re constructing a strategy to build up traffic to your site via content marketing methods and you need to see what your competitors are ranking for.
Whatever your reasons for wanting to find out traffic data, there are tools and resources available that can give you a general idea of a website’s metrics. Unless you own or manage the actual website, you’re probably not going to be able to pinpoint the visitor count or pageviews with certainty.
However, you can get an estimated idea of the site’s popularity overall.
My favourite tool for finding out website traffic data of websites and blogs is SEMrush and ahrefs. I will go into a bit more detail on these two later in this article.
Rundown of the best website traffic checking tools
1. Alexa.com Rankings
Alexa.com tracks website visitor traffic rankings for many websites on the Internet. Their data is not completely accurate, because it involves flawed methodology. Alexa ranks websites based on how much traffic they get from users who have chosen to install the Alexa toolbar. Alexa toolbar users are a small minority of website users, which makes the data somewhat skewed. However, basic Alexa data is free to the public and easy to obtain, and it does give you insights you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Personally I never use Alexa to check website traffic. Back in the day, it was a good tool because you didn’t have resources like SEMrush or Ahrefs.
At best it’ll give you a very rough idea as to how much traffic a website gets.
2. Ahrefs.com
For me, ahrefs is vital for my everyday tasks within blogging and affiliate marketing. It is by far the best competitive analysis and tracking tools on the market.
With this software you can get a huge amount of website traffic information such as:
And so, so much more…
3. Comscore Reports
Comscore publishes a number of different traffic reports. Their reports tend to cover only the largest publishers, and they include metrics by country for websites with the highest traffic numbers. This can be useful if you are interested in learning about how much traffic the most prominent websites on the Internet are generating.
4. The BuySellAds Marketplace
If a website is using the BuySellAds platform for generating advertising revenue, the site’s ad impressions are disclosed in the BuySellAds marketplace.
5. Press Kits, Media Kits and “Advertise Here” Pages
Many websites make their metrics available to potential advertisers via press kits, media kits or “advertise here” pages. These pages typically might include data about the number of unique visitors, repeat visitors, monthly pageviews, daily pageviews, newsletter subscriber counts, rss feed subscribers and social media followers the website gets.
6. Traffic Estimator at Trafficestimate.com
This free resource gives you a bunch of data in one place, although some of it is inaccurate. You’ll be able to find out some basic Alexa rankings, keyword phrases the website is targeting, other websites targeting similar keyword phrases and websites with close relationships. If you’re researching smaller or newer websites, you might not get any results from this tool. The closely related websites report is flawed; in some cases it does find closely related sites, but in other cases the sites it shows are all unrelated.
7. Compete.com Site Analytics
This is a paid service that allows you to monitor a number of different website metrics, including the USA-based traffic to competing websites.
8. SEMrush.com Competitive Data
SEMrush.com offers another paid service that’s useful for researching the traffic levels to competing websites. You can also use this service for finding information about your competitors’ paid ad campaigns and other details. You can read more on how I use SEMRush for finding traffic data.
9. Similarweb Pro
Similarweb.com makes multiple services available. They offer both a free version and a pro version. Their pro service allows you to monitor competitors’ website traffic statistics. You can also get data about apps using the similarweb.com site.
10. Quantcast Analytics
Quantcast offers you a multiple opportunities to discover a website’s traffic measures. If you are interested in finding out metrics for your own website, you can subscribe to their services to receive detailed insights.
Quantcast also offers website owners the choice to make selected analytics data publicly available. Many website owners take advantage of this because they think it benefits them to show potential advertisers their site’s metrics as verified by an unbiased, trusted third-party source. So you can check to see if the website you are interested in researching has a public Quantcast profile available.
11. Searchmetrics
Similar to SEMRush, Searchmetrics will show you the organic search visibility and search traffic for a website and also their top keyword terms that they rank for.
12. Income and Traffic Reports
Some bloggers such as Pat Flynn and Matthew Woodward often share their traffic/income reports with their audience. So have a dig in their archives to see their traffic stats.
Of course some of these third party tools don’t have the full picture but they can really help give you a flavour of what is going on, this study by Moz has some useful insights on how these tools collect data and their accuracy.
Tools You Can Use on Your Own Blog
However, if you’re more interested in understanding your own blogs traffic a little better than these tools will be very useful.
1. Google Analytics
If you’re interested in monitoring web traffic hits to your own website, Google Analytics is one possible resource you could use for this purpose. Google Analytics is worth considering if you want a free solution and you don’t mind sharing all your data with the Internet’s monolithic ad-driven monopoly. If you want more control over your data and your site’s privacy, there are also some alternative options you could consider. With GA you get to see where the traffic is coming from. Knowing your own traffic sources will help you to understand your target audience a lot better.
2. Clicky Web Analytics
If you’re interested in monitoring traffic to your own website, Clicky offers both free and paid versions you might be interested in checking out. Clicky integrates with some of the data from Google Analytics, and this platform also gives you bunches of options that are not available through Google analytics. For example, Clicky offers you some detailed information about your website visitors and search traffic. You’ll learn their usernames, locations, web hosting companies, web browsers, return visits and more.
3. Piwik Analytics
Piwik is a free, open source analytics platform for monitoring web traffic to your own website.
Piwik has some distinct advantages over Google Analytics and other third-party provided analytics platforms. The open source nature of the software allows you to retain complete control over your data without allowing a profit-motivated third party to have access to it.
There are some WordPress plugins available for use with Piwik, and there are also options for custom development.
4. Statpress WordPress Plugin
If your blog or website is powered by the WordPress blog platform, you could use the Statpress plugin to monitor your traffic and traffic sources. Statpress gives you details about the visits to your website from both human visitors and ‘bots. Graphs are included to help you visualize your traffic patterns. You’ll be able to see your metrics for unique visitors, pageviews, ‘bot visits, and more.
Statpress also provides data about the latest hits to your website and where they came from. You’ll be able to access a list of the latest 500 keyword phrases that web searchers queried to find your website.
Statpress is a free, self-hosted plugin. You do not need a security key to use it. You retain control over your data when you use this plugin.
There have been multiple versions of Statpress released and maintained by different WordPress plugin developers. The link above takes you to the version that’s been most recently updated as of the time of this writing.
5. Woopra
Woopra is a paid service offering customizable analytics for the purposes of discovering how much web traffic goes to your own website and understanding your website’s customer base. Woopra can help you to develop individual profiles for every user who visits your site. They offer a free trial if you want to learn more.
In my experience so far, these resources have been the most helpful for determining the traffic to a website. You could use a combination of these resources to discover interesting insights about web traffic data and metrics for many different websites or blogs on the Internet.
Have you used any additional resources for finding out how much traffic a website gets? If so, please share them in the comments. I welcome suggestions for other sources that would be good additions to this list.
17 best website tracking tools to measure traffic, user behavior, and performance
A website tracking tool will track, measure, and report on website activity and visitor behavior including traffic, user clicks, and performance (e.g. conversion rate). Tracking tools show you what’s happening on your website so you can learn what is (and isn’t) working and optimize for improved UX and business goals.
Last updated
5 popular free website tracking tools
If you’re looking for free web tracking tools, here’s a cheat sheet of the most popular ones covered in this guide:
Google Analytics: measure website traffic and find your best (and worst) performing pages
Hotjar: track user behavior and gather product experience insights with heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and user feedback
Google Optimize: A/B test page variations to find the best-performing designs
Google Search Console: measure SEO performance and check for crawling and speed errors
Mixpanel: monitor product metrics like activation, retention, and churn
Whether you’re new to website tracking or looking to get deeper insights than the usual traffic stats, you’ll find the best tools here, broken down into three categories:
Website traffic tracking tools
Traffic is usually the first thing that gets tracked on a website or app, by using web analytics tools. Traffic metrics can tell you how many site visitors you have, how they found you, how long they spend browsing different pages, and how frequently they’re converting into customers.
What traffic metrics can you track?
User source and medium
Session duration or time on page
Device type (i.e. desktop, tablet, or mobile)
New vs returning users
5 top website traffic tracking tools
1. Google Analytics
What it is: Google Analytics is a popular website analytics tool; the latest version is called GA4.
What you can track: new and returning users, engagement, revenue, retention, demographics, conversions, and events.
Price: free (with limits); upgrade to the paid version (Google 360) for more features and unlimited traffic.
💡 Using WordPress? Google has an official plugin called Site Kit by Google that helps you set up and monitor Google Analytics from your WordPress dashboard.
2. Adobe Analytics
What it is: Adobe Analytics is a traffic analytics and multichannel data collection tool, designed for advanced users and enterprise companies.
What you can track: business intelligence (BI) and traffic data from websites, emails, and apps, including pageviews, unique visitors, purchases, order attribution, segmentation, and customer journey analytics.
Price: on request.
3. Matomo (formerly Piwik)
What it is: Matomo is an open-source web traffic analytics application.
What you can track: unsampled traffic metrics, ecommerce and event tracking, custom dimensions, goals, and segments.
Price: free (self-hosted).
4. Clicky
What it is: Clicky is a real-time website traffic analytics tool.
What you can track: real-time data, including visitors, pageviews, and events.
Price: from free for 3,000 pageviews/day.
5. Fathom
What it is: Fathom is a simple, privacy-focused analytics tool.
What you can track: site views, unique views, average time on site, bounce rate, goal completions, referrers, country, user device, and browser type.
💡 Pro tip: website tracking isn’t limited to websites you own; you can also track traffic on competitor websites with tools like SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, and Semrush. The data isn’t 100% accurate but should give you a relative understanding of how your website traffic compares to other sites.
Similarweb’s estimated website traffic for hotjar.com
Website behavior tracking tools
By tracking traffic, you’ll get a good idea of what’s going on on your website—the most popular pages, where people leave from, and where they spend time browsing. Now, you’re ready to track how people interact with your pages.
What is behavior tracking?
Behavior tracking shows you where your users click and how they scroll or navigate between pages. The main goal behind user behavior tracking is to measure user experience, find opportunities to improve UX and, as a result, increase conversions and revenue.
What tools can you use to track user behavior?
Heatmaps: see an overview of where visitors click, tap, and scroll on a page.
Session recordings: view how each user browses across multiple pages.
A/B testing: create page design variations and test which performs better.
Surveys: get direct feedback from users and track sentiment and satisfaction over time.
User testing: interview users as they navigate your site.
5 user behavior tracking tools to improve your website
1. Hotjar
What it is: Hotjar (that’s us, hi there! 👋) is behavior analytics and user feedback software that helps you understand why visitors do (and don’t) take certain actions on your site, and get voice of the customer (VoC) feedback from them.
What you can track: product experience insights like aggregated visitor clicks, scrolls, and mouse movement with heatmaps; individual user browsing behavior with session recordings; and user feedback with on-site surveys and a Feedback widget.
Price: from free for 35 sessions/day.
Tracking user behavior in 4 simple steps
Hotjar isn’t technically a single website tracking tool, it’s four tools in one: heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and user feedback.
1. Heatmaps
What is it: Hotjar Heatmaps measure aggregated clicks, taps, scrolls, and mouse movement on any page (from a website or single-page application).
When to use it: use heatmaps to track user behavior and get a visual overview of what content is getting seen and what’s being ignored. Use this insight to make changes to your pages and improve UX.
2. Session Recordings
What is it: Hotjar Recordings are renderings of browsing behavior from individual visitors across one or multiple pages.
When to use it: use session recordings to track how users really experience your site, and see what led to a conversion or exit.
3. Surveys
What is it: Hotjar Surveys are targeted pop-up surveys that give you insight direct from the best source of data: your users.
When to use it: use surveys to track customer satisfaction (CSAT surveys), customer effort (CES surveys), and how likely they are to recommend your products or brand (NPS surveys) over time.
4. Feedback
What is it: Feedback allows users to tag and comment on any part of a page.
When to use it: use Feedback to get user insight on any page without setting up a survey, so you can track what people love and hate, identify issues, and find opportunities for improvement.
💭 Understand your users with Hotjar
Use Hotjar to safely track user behavior and understand how people experience and interact with your website or app.