|
Track Your Website Traffic Free
By Vernon Sandel
Once you have a website you will need statistics to help you
know how to improve your site. You need to know:
-
The number of people visiting your website.
-
The number of unique and returning visitors.
-
How long they stay.
-
The bounce rate (percentage of single page visits)
-
The number of pages visited.
-
The source of your traffic. (How they found it.)
-
The search engine search terms leading to your site.
-
The entry and exit pages.
Without statistics you would never know how your web site is
faring, what pages are most interesting to your visitors, or what keywords with
which you should optimize your content. Knowing where your traffic is
coming from will help you increase it by repeating successful tactics.
Almost all web hosting plans come with statistics of some sort.
Often they are very basic and only for a single domain if you have more than one
website. Some web hosts offer more complete statistics for an additional
price. However, there is no need to pay for good statistics. Google
Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics)
offers great statistics and best of all--for free! You are not limited to
one website, you can track them all.
When you sign up Google will give you a few lines of code to put
on each page of your website. This allows Google to detect whenever a page
is visited, how long, the IP address of the visitor, how the visitor found the
page, and activity on the page. The data is assembled into summary reports
for easy interpretation of the data.
Another great site which offers excellent statistics free is
StatCounter (http://www.statcounter.com.
They give you even more data than Google presently, but in my opinion it is not
organized quite as well. There is also a limit on the log size for the
free service. The setup for StatCounter is similar to that of Google.
One valuable feature that StatCounter has that Google apparently does not have
is the abililty to exclude your own visits from the statistics for a truer count
of external visitors.
With the availability of excellent statistics at no cost, there
is no reason to pay for the service.
| 
