Site Tracking and Web Statistics
Web Site Tracking & Site SEO Statistics
Who visits your website and what do they do there ?
Get detailed current and historic web stats on all your websites from top referrals to traffic path analysis.
We use a variety of solutions to track website visitors, obviously there are some limitations with what you can do now that there are some European rules and regulations.
Key Tracking Features
General Tracking Features:
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Unique Visitors: This metric tracks the number of distinct individuals who visit your website within a specified time frame, providing insights into your site's reach.
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Sessions: Sessions represent the overall number of visits to your website, including multiple page views by the same user in a single session.
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Page Views: Page views quantify the total number of pages that visitors view on your site, offering a snapshot of user engagement.
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Hourly and Weekday Distribution: This feature provides a breakdown of when your website receives the most traffic during different times of the day and days of the week.
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Robot Page Views: Monitoring robot or bot traffic helps in distinguishing between human visitors and automated web crawlers, which can be essential for SEO and security purposes.
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Average Page View/Visitor: Calculating the average page views per visitor helps understand how engaging your content is, as higher numbers indicate more interaction.
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Average User Visitor/Day: This metric reveals the average number of unique visitors your website receives each day.
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Average Page View/Day: It measures the average daily page views, indicating how frequently your content is accessed.
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Average User Visitor/Hour: This feature delves into hourly user traffic patterns, providing insights into peak visiting times.
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Average Page View/Hour: This metric focuses on hourly page view trends, helping optimize your content release schedule.
Referrers Tracking:
Grouped by domain with full URL's: This feature allows you to see not only which domains are referring traffic to your site but also the specific pages or URLs within those domains, helping you understand where your traffic is coming from.
Search Engine Keywords and More: You can track the keywords that led users to your site from search engines, providing valuable SEO insights and helping you tailor your content accordingly.
Countries Tracking:
Direct IP to Country Conversion: By accurately determining users' countries using IP addresses, you avoid the inaccuracies of inverse lookup methods, giving you precise information about your global audience.
Pages Tracking:
Separate Hit Stats for Each Page: This allows you to see how individual pages on your site are performing, helping you identify which content is most popular and engaging.
Robots Tracking:
Hits by a Certain Robot: You can monitor and analyze the activity of specific web robots, ensuring they are accessing the intended content and not causing any issues.
Browsers Tracking:
Full User-Agent Strings: This feature provides comprehensive information about the user agents, helping you understand the browsers used by your audience, which is essential for optimizing your website's compatibility.
By utilizing these tracking features, you gain a comprehensive view of your website's performance, user behavior, and sources of traffic, which can inform strategic decisions and improvements to enhance your online presence.
Benefits of Analytics Event Tracking
Event tracking transforms your web traffic data into specific, actionable business insights.
The primary advantage of implementing detailed analytics event tracking is in its ability to transform passive traffic data into deep, actionable user behavior understanding.
Instead of just knowing a page was visited, event tracking provides granular insights by revealing what users did on the page, such as playing a video, scrolling past a certain point, or engaging with a specific FAQ section. This capability is critical for Friction Identification, as it allows businesses to pinpoint exactly where users are getting stuck, whether they are abandoning a crucial form or exiting a checkout funnel early. Beyond identifying friction, the data enables Accurate Conversion Measurement by tracking vital micro-conversions—smaller, preparatory steps like adding an item to a cart or viewing a pricing page—which lead up to the final purchase. By marking these as key events, businesses can conduct robust Funnel and Flow Analysis , visualizing the precise sequence of events users take and immediately identifying drop-offs for optimization.
This rich event data is essential for ongoing efforts to Optimize User Experience (UX), serving as the validation bedrock for A/B tests and providing metrics to evaluate Content Effectiveness, ensuring marketing and development efforts are directly focused on improving areas proven to drive business results and maximize the return on investment (ROI) from marketing campaigns.
Analytics Event Tracking
While the exact steps vary by platform (website vs. app) and tools (Google Tag Manager vs. direct code), the general process of using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Tag Manager (GTM) is similar.
1. Planning and Naming Conventions
The most crucial first step is to define what you want to track and how you will name and recognise the event.
- Identify Key Actions: List the meaningful interactions users can take (e.g., clicking an "Add to Cart" button, watching a video, downloading a PDF, submitting a form).
- Choose a Naming Convention: Use a consistent format to make reports easy to read.
- Best Practice: Use snake_case (all lowercase, words separated by underscores).
- Example: Instead of "Sign Up Button Click," use signup_button_click or, even better, generate_lead (which is a Recommended Event in GA4).
- Define Parameters: Determine the extra details (parameters) you need for context.
- Example Event: download_file
- Parameters: file_name (e.g., "annual_report.pdf"), file_type (e.g., "pdf").
2. Implementation Using Google Tag Manager (GTM)
GTM acts as an intermediary, allowing you to add and manage tracking code without changing your website's source code directly.
Step Action Description
A Create a GA4 Event Tag In GTM, navigate to Tags and click New. Choose the Google Analytics: GA4 Event type.
B Configure the Tag Select your GA4 Measurement ID. Enter the exact Event Name you planned (e.g., signup_newsletter). Add any Event Parameters (key-value pairs) you defined.
C Create a Trigger The trigger tells GTM when to send the event data. Click the Triggering section in the Tag. Click + New Trigger and choose the relevant type, such as: * All Elements: For general clicks. * Form Submission: For tracking forms. * Page View: For tracking visits to a specific "Thank You" or confirmation page.
D Set Trigger Conditions Specify the conditions for the trigger. For a button click, this might be: * Trigger Type: Click - All Elements * Condition: Click Text contains "Sign up for the newsletter"
E Save and Preview Save the Tag and Trigger. Click Preview in GTM to launch your website in debug mode. Perform the action (e.g., click the button) and check the GTM Preview pane to ensure the event works.
F Publish Once testing is complete, click Submit in GTM to publish your changes.
3. Verification in Google Analytics 4
After publishing your changes, verify that the data is appearing in your GA4 property:
Realtime Report: This report will show events as they happen, usually within a few seconds.
DebugView: This specialized GA4 report (available via the Admin panel) is best for rigorous testing, showing a detailed stream of events for your device.
Mark as a Key Event (Conversion): If the event is a critical business goal (like a purchase or a lead submission), you should mark it as a Key Event (previously "Conversion") in the Admin > Events section of GA4.
Tracking Traffic from AI Search
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews now send visitors to websites. Most analytics setups lump this traffic into "referral" or "direct" and never report it separately.
We configure Google Analytics 4 to identify and group visits that arrive from AI assistants and answer engines, so you can see how much traffic and how many enquiries AI search produces for your business.
- AI referral channel group - a custom GA4 channel that collects sessions from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com, gemini.google.com and claude.ai.
- Conversions from AI search - form submissions, calls and sales attributed to AI referrals, reported alongside organic and paid search.
- Search Console query analysis - spotting long, conversational queries and pages where impressions rise while clicks fall, a common sign that an AI Overview is answering the question on the results page.
- Brand citation checks - regular prompts in the main AI assistants to record whether your business is named and which of your pages are cited.
AI referral numbers are still small for most UK businesses, but they are growing and the visitors tend to arrive with a specific question already answered. Measuring them now gives you a baseline before AI search becomes a larger share of your traffic. Read more about AI search optimisation.
