Analytics For Website Owners: Why Your Hosting Account Log File Is Not Enough

One of the most rewarding aspects of owning and operating your own website is being

able to have access to very detailed reports about all of the website visitors that arrive on your website. Every single hosting account will give you access to something called a log file, which is the raw data of the bandwidth usage on your website. This file can yield some interesting data such as how often search engine spiders archive the content on your website, but much of this data such as the IP addresses of your website visitors is of little or no practical use to the average website owner.

There are a variety of different web analytics software packages that are available to website operators on any sort of a budget, which range from free up to around $99 per month. Unless you have a website that is already highly profitable and that requires enterprise-level web analytics that will be used to make important business decisions, you will probably find everything that you need by signing up for a free service such as Google Analytics. One of the great things about running Google Analytics on your website is that you are able to sync this account up with your webmaster tools account, so that you can have very detailed data about the search engine traffic that shows up on your website.

One very interesting piece of data that will show up in both your hosting account log file and also in your analytics account is the geographic location of your website visitors, however Google Analytics takes this data a step further by displaying it directly on a map of the entire world. This means that you can hover your mouse over a specific country and see exactly how many people from that country have visited your website. You can also see how long these visitors stayed on your website and what links they clicked on.

It is not very difficult to get Google Analytics or any other sort of related software running and reporting data on your website. All you need to do is copy and paste a small piece of Javascript code that will show up on either the header or footer of each page that you would like to receive data for. You can learn a tremendous amount of new information about the ways that people find your website and where most of your traffic comes from, and this can allow you to make changes or adjustments to your website which allow you to take advantage of this new data for greater profit.

Copyright (c) 2012 RickyWeber.com

by: Ricky Weber

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