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Website TrafficHow To Track All Your Website Traffic For Free
by:
Louis Allport
Copyright 2005 Joe louis Allport
Do you know:
* Exactly how many a folk are visiting your website?
* How long they're staying on your site before they come on?
* Exactly wherever
those visitors are coming from, each day?
* How more of your website traffic is repeat visitors?
* The exact paths folk take as they click their way through your website?
Here's what I'm deed at:
If you don't cognize your visitors, it does it *very* difficult for you to improve the performance of your website and turn more visitors into customers - AND - get more quality traffic. For the simple reason that you're effectively working blind.
Without knowing how folk visit your site and what they do on your site, any attempts at growing your traffic and rising
the gain of your website is working with one armed tied behind your back, at least.
And alas - the web stats that come with your web-hosting are generally not enough these days.
Depending on your web host, chances are you've either got Webalizer, Analog Stats, or AWStats installed on your server. Here's how that code works:
It takes the "raw" (unreadable to the human eye) information your web server stores of everyone that visits and presents this in an easy to understand way.
Unfortunately, due to a number of technical reasons, this information is often conferred in quite an inaccurate way.
And in my personal experience, these code packages don't present this information in a particularly helpful way either for being trying to improve the conversion ratios and gain of their website.
What I in person
do, and what I would-be suggest you do is use a "Tracking Solution" that accurately tracks and reports all your visitors in an easy to see and understand way. These solutions come in two forms: Code & Services
Both these options have their pros and cons, but what they some
do really well is present exactly what's happening on your website right up to the minute, and in a way that's really helpful to you for fashioning nice (and profitable) decisions for your business.
To start with here's a code resolution you can install and use for free on your website:
Now before you go and install it, you should of course be familiar with beginning code on your server. If you're not comfortable beginning code on your website, a chase service (which I'll come to in a moment) would-be probably be better for you.
And it's as well important to note that beginning code on your website can often put more strain on the server. This is particularly true if you're on shared hosting.
I've in person
used the following free chase code and it works well. See what you think. Go to http://www.curve2.com and look for "TrackPro". As I write this, version 2 is in Beta and is downloadable from the site at the following address: http://www.curve2.com/trackpro.php
You'll as well find many a further free chase code solutions at http://www.hotscripts.com.
But in person
speaking, what I've found works really well and avoids golf shot any accumulated strain on my existing websites is mistreatment a third party chase service.
The only things actually to worry just about once
mistreatment a third party service are:
* How long wish this service be around? (If they finish their service after a year, you wouldn't be able to access your past data and wish have to change all your chase codes on your pages too.)
* What is their privacy policy regarding my web stats? (Are they honest and trustworthy in different words. You don't want the service owners perusing and then duplicating your eminent business plan.)
Over the past month I've been mistreatment ecommStats (http://www.ecommstats.com). Now, this service isn't free, but at this time they give you 50,000 free page views per domain, and depending how busy your site is those page views can last you a really long time.
The service works great and is really easy to add to your pages -- just add three lines of code at the bottom of each of your pages (you can easily do this with Server Side Includes if you're comfortable with that) and all your visitors get half-track accurately and in great detail.
Alternatively - an entirely free (at this time) and really established service is StatCounter (http://statcounter.com). It even as has a rave review from Tucows.com (one of the largest transfer
sites on the internet) which speaks for itself and adds a lot of believability to the service.
And just in case you're curious how a free service like StatCounter does money, well - since it's such a popular service with many a webmasters work
in every day (and many a I'm sure even as more than once a day just like me) that it's ready-made it really easy for them to sell a lot of advertising on their site. They as well offer an upgrade to their advanced paid service.
But thinking on the far side
free services, as your business grows you may choose to upgrade to high end paid services that provide even as more in depth information just about your visitors...
Services like Fry (Urchin.com - in hand
by Google) or Deep Metrix (DeepMetix.com). However, to help you grow your business to that point you need to support a close eye on what your visitors are doing and wherever
they're coming from, and free chase code and services is a great way for you to start to do this.
Just just about the author:
Joe louis Allport is an online product developer and marketer. To get a FREE copy of his powerful "Viral PDF Generator" script, visit the following site: http://www.BrandPDF.com
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