Tools For Tracking Traffic as Press & Content Creators
Views From The Mountaintop
How to Track Your Traffic As Press or a Content Creator
As an online creator, growth on your platform is essential to your success. Tracking that success, or in some cases tracking the lack thereof, can be helpful in understanding trends and maintaining consistency, which is absolutely essential for longevity in the entertainment industry.
Traffic metrics can tell you how many visitors/followers you have, how they found you, how long they spend browsing your content, and how often consuming your content leads to a tangible return on investment.
So the next thing you need to ask yourself is what traffic metrics can you track, why is that important, and what tools should you be using to help you through that process?
Tools for Press
As a journalist, your audience generally interacts with you on gaming sites, and blogs, so primarily you’ll be looking at the analytics for web traffic to determine your overall success. The main reason you’ll want to track your traffic is so that you know who your audience is, where they’re from, and how they’re engaging with your content.
A few of the tools we use over at Terminals.io to determine the reach of gaming press sites are applications like SimilarWeb and Google Analytics.
SimilarWeb, or more specifically, SimilarWeb Pro, is a web tool we use on Terminals to track the web traffic for users who apply as gaming press. SimilarWeb tracks traffic and engagement by counting site visits, determining the number of new versus returning users, and tracking the platforms that users access your site with. Terminals uses SimilarWeb to determine how many average viewers a site sees every month as well as establish the consistency of site traffic and where the user base is located.
Google Analytics similarly analyzes website traffic and offers statistics that lets users determine audience behaviour on a page by page basis. Looking at real time traffic on each page as well as tracking things like a user’s journey through your site will allow you to better understand how users are engaging with your content, and better curate the way information is presented.
Tools for Creators and Influencers
Analyzing audience statistics are also key factors behind the growth and success of content creators on their platforms. Familiarity with the following tools can not only help track content trends for yourself and your audience, but also give you an idea of what’s currently popular on both social media and content creation platforms!
Twitch Tracker is one such tool that is especially useful for Twitch Streamers. As the name suggests, it tracks Twitch statistics. It provides a database of all Twitch channels, documenting the top streams and top channels on the platform. It does the hard work of pooling the information together into filterable searches. You can search by channel, game, or clip and filter the information by time period, giving you an easy to use tool to view your statistics over time.
Sully Gnome is another option for streamers that is more granular in its focus. In terms of presentation, it offers the same data points for tracking streaming information as Twitch Tracker, but the main difference lies in the UI. While it offers a lot of the same functionality as Twitch Tracker, it offers extra search filters and new data points like analyzing Twitch Team statistics and offering specific information about gaming trends on Twitch by documenting prior and upcoming milestones for Twitch channels based on calculated projections.
YouTubers, TikTokers, and other influencers outside the Twitch streaming space have their own tools to use when it comes to tracking traffic. A popular option for most is SocialBlade, a platform that (huge surprise) allows you to track the audience trends on your platform of choice. While it also offers much of the same basic functionality as the tools we mentioned earlier, it’s unique in its offering of estimated monthly earnings and growth projections. Statistics uniquely befitting of creators looking to profit from their work and expand their reach as influencers.
With all these tools at your disposal, you should have no problems understanding trends and improving the consistency and reach of your content, whether you’re an up-and-coming games journalist or content creator looking to become the next big hit!
Published September, 30 2022
Last updated September, 30 2022
