It sounds simple enough, but it gets more complex if you want figures that can inform business decisions. You need to decide what you’re going to measure. There’s also a process to make sure it’s all set up correctly.

This guide walks you through the process in seven practical steps, whether you're starting from scratch or adapting your existing setup. You'll learn where to find your traffic reports and how to read them. We'll also explain why your figures may differ from those shown by external traffic checkers. 

What you can track, and what each part needs

Website traffic tracking starts with knowing what you want to find out. An analytics tag will give you the basic traffic figures, but some questions need a little extra setup.

To learn more about tracking website traffic and how the data gets collected, check out our guide to web analytics. 

How to track website traffic in seven steps

Step 1: Write down the three questions

Before you install anything, decide exactly what you want to find out about your website traffic.

Start with three questions you want your tracking to answer. This helps you choose the right reports and measure the right actions. For example, you might want to find out which channels bring visitors who request a demo, or which pages people visit before filling out a contact form.

It's tempting to track everything, but you'll only end up with masses of data and very little useful information. For a full measurement plan, read our guide to web analytics strategy.

Step 2: Install an analytics tag

To monitor website traffic, you'll need to install an analytics tag. We'll use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) as our default example.

If you're starting from scratch, go to analytics.google.com and create a GA4 account and property. Then click Admin > Data streams > Add stream > Web. Enter your website URL and a name for the stream, then click Create stream. You'll find your measurement ID in the stream details.

If you've already got a GA4 property, open Admin > Data streams and select your existing web data stream.

Click View tag instructions to find your installation options. You can copy the Google tag and paste it into the header of your website's pages. Using Google Tag Manager is a good choice if you plan to add more tracking tags later. If you'd rather avoid editing code, you can use your website's built-in CMS integration. Make sure the tag is installed across your entire website, including pages that use different templates.

Other analytics tools have their pros and cons. Our guide to website analytics tools will help you make the right choice.

Your tag should now be installed across the site. We'll check that it's recording visits in Step 4.

Step 3: Sort out consent before you collect 

If your site uses a consent banner, some visitors will decline analytics cookies, and that changes what your reports show.

Google's consent mode documentation explains how its tags behave depending on the visitor's choice. With basic consent mode, Google tags are blocked until someone gives consent. If they decline, no data is sent. In advanced mode, when someone declines, Google tags can still send cookieless measurements and consent signals. GA4 can use these to model some of the missing activity.

Your reported traffic will be lower than the actual number of visits. That's expected when visitors decline tracking. Our guide to cookieless analytics explains why.

Before you collect data, ask whoever manages your consent banner to confirm that it and the Google tags behave as intended.

Step 4: Check that it works

In GA4, open Reports > Realtime, then visit your website from your phone using mobile data. Your visit should appear within a minute or so. Our guide to real-time web analytics explains what else you can check here.

Next, make sure the tag works across all page templates, rather than just the homepage. Check that you've filtered out visits from your own team, and that your reporting time zone and currency are correct. Many tracking problems go unnoticed because nobody checked the original setup. If you're an agency taking on a new client, run these checks before relying on their existing data.

Our guide to web analytics best practices explains how to keep your tracking consistent.

Step 5: Connect Google Search Console

Google Analytics 4 tells you when someone visits your site through organic search. Google Search Console goes further, showing which searches brought people to your site and how often your pages appeared in search results.

Open Google Search Console and add your website as a property. Follow the instructions to verify that you own the site.

Open GA4 and go to Admin > Product links > Search Console links. Click Link, choose your verified Search Console property, and select the relevant web data stream. Then submit the link.

Once connected, you’ll be able to access Search Console reports in GA4, including organic search queries and search traffic. These reports may take a day or two to appear. To access the reports in GA4, open Reports > Library and publish the Search Console collection. 

Step 6: Tag your campaign links

Use utm parameters to track visits from specific marketing campaigns. These are short tags added to a URL that tell GA4 which email, ad, or social media post sent the visit to your site. 

For example, a link in a LinkedIn campaign might look like this:

https://www.example.com/demo?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=paid_social&utm_campaign=autumn_demo

 The parameters tell GA4 that the visitor came from LinkedIn through a paid social campaign promoting your demo.

Agree on a naming convention for your tags and stick to it across your campaigns, including capitalization. In our example, GA4 would treat "LinkedIn" and "linkedin" as different sources, making your reports harder to compare. 

Alternatively, you could use our free UTM builder to fill in the parameters in the same format each time, which would keep "LinkedIn" and "linkedin" from showing up as two sources.

 To check your results, click a tagged link yourself, then open GA4's Traffic acquisition report. Use the source and campaign information to see whether GA4 recorded the visit correctly.

Step 7: Mark the actions that matter

 In GA4, you can track specific actions by marking them as key events. If GA4 isn't already recording the action as a separate event, you'll need to create one first.

For example, if your demo form sends people to a thank-you page, you can create the event from that page view. Go to Admin > Data display > Events > Create event, give it a name like demo_request, and set two conditions: event_name equals page_view, and page_location contains your thank-you page's URL path. Save it, then mark it as a key event.

 Start by defining three to five visitor interactions that are important to your business. For a B2B website without a checkout, these might include visits to the pricing page, demo requests, contact form submissions, or resource downloads.

 To mark an existing event, open GA4 and go to Admin > Data display > Events. Find the event you want to track and click the star beside it to mark it as a key event.

 Test it by visiting your website and completing the relevant action yourself, such as submitting a test form. Open the Realtime report in GA4 and check that the event appears.

 You can then use your key event reports to see how often visitors complete the actions you've selected.

Where to look once the data comes in

 Now that you've got everything set up, you can start using GA4 to track website traffic and answer the questions you wrote down earlier. GA4 and Google Search Console offer a range of reports, each giving you a different view of what’s happening on your website.

 Start by looking at how your numbers change over several weeks. A sudden spike in traffic might look impressive, but one busy day tells you very little about how your website is performing. Compare the channels bringing people to your site with the actions those visitors complete. You might find that one channel brings plenty of traffic, while another brings fewer visitors who are more likely to request a demo. For more guidance on interpreting the figures, read our guide to the most important website metrics.

 There's also a newer traffic source to keep an eye on. According to Google's default channel group documentation, GA4 includes an AI Assistant channel in its Traffic acquisition report. This covers visits from services like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot. Traffic from Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode sits outside this channel. Our guide to AI traffic analytics explains how to measure this traffic in more detail.

Your own numbers versus traffic checker estimates

 You might have seen traffic checker tools that claim to tell you how many visitors a website receives. The figures they give you can be very different from what you see in GA4.

That's because they measure traffic differently.

 GA4 collects data through the analytics tag installed on your website. It records visits according to your tracking setup, including any limitations caused by cookie consent or other gaps in data collection.

 External traffic checkers can't access that tag. Instead, they estimate traffic using information from user panels, clickstream data (records of people's browsing activity), and search rankings. They use this information to calculate how much traffic a website might receive. These estimates can be useful when comparing larger websites, where more information is generally available. For smaller B2B websites, the picture is often much less reliable. With fewer signals to draw on, the estimates can be a long way off.

 If you're reporting on your own website, use the figures from your analytics setup. Bear in mind that those numbers also have limitations, particularly when visitors decline tracking. External estimates have their uses, but your own analytics reports should be the starting point for measuring your site's traffic.

What traffic numbers cannot tell you

 GA4 tells you how many visits your website receives and tracks users through their browsers. But for a B2B company, there’s huge value in also knowing which businesses are visiting. According to Leadfeeder's product data, around 2% of website visitors ever fill out a form. That leaves plenty of potential buyers researching your business without making themselves known.

This is where company-level identification comes in. It uses a visitor's IP address to identify anonymous website visitors by matching it to the organization behind the visit. It identifies companies rather than individual people. This forms part of website intelligence, which helps B2B marketers understand which companies are showing interest in their business. 

Leadfeeder gives you a way to investigate this activity. With Web Visitors, you can identify b2b website visitors by company name and see which pages those companies viewed. Leadfeeder Web Insights takes this further. Its ready-made reports show how many companies came through each marketing channel or campaign, how many visited individual pages, and how many fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). It also shows firmographic information, such as company size and industry, alongside the average Intent Score. One useful measure is the ICP ratio, which is the share of identified companies that fit your ideal customer profile. You can use it to see which sources are attracting businesses you want to reach.

Leadfeeder works alongside GA4, although their figures won't match. GA4 counts sessions and users, while Leadfeeder counts companies. To get started, install Leadfeeder's tracking script alongside your GA4 tag. After a week, open the Traffic Sources report and check how many companies each channel brought in, along with their ICP ratios.

Start your 14-day Leadfeeder free trial (no credit card required; terms and conditions apply), install the tracking script alongside your GA4 tag, and after a week, you’ll see which companies visited your site.