subject: How To Monitor Website Traffic – The Best Free Tools [print this page] How To Monitor Website Traffic The Best Free Tools
The ability to monitor website traffic is absolutely essential if you are serious about growing your online business and you have the desire to increase the amount of visitors you receive.
Being able to see where your visitors come from, how long they spend on your website and what content they view etc gives you an absolutely invaluable insight into what is working (and what isn't) in your business right now...
Let's say you check your statistics and find that one particular traffic source (for example the Warrior forum) has sent 500 people to your website in the last two days. That's a pretty hot source and it shows you that you should probably spend some more time promoting your site on the Warrior Forum. You also notice that from that traffic source 100 of them signed up to your mailing list on the homepage this indicates that the traffic this website is sending to you is pretty targeted and that they are definitely interested in the content you are providing.
Here are the best free tools to monitor website traffic.
1. Google Analytics
This is probably the most well known tool of them all and it provides an excellent level of information. You simply insert some code onto your website (Google provides this for you and it is very easy to install) and from that the system tracks visitors to your site. You can get a general snapshot of your sites traffic, as well as more detailed information such as referring websites, visitor locations, time spent on your website, average page views, the top performing pages, etc (the list is almost endless.) Google Analytics also has the advantage that it links in nicely if you are using Google Adwords to promote your website.
2. StatCounter
This is another pretty well known and (in my opinion) excellent tool. StatCounter provides a similar level of information to monitor website traffic and has its own special features too. It works in a similar way to Analytics, so it is pretty simple to set up.
3. Your Hosting Account
Many hosting accounts come together with a tool already installed which will monitor traffic to your website. The advantage here is that it is all built into your hosting package and there is often no need to install any tracking code (useful if you feel especially daunted by the process of doing so.)
Whichever tool you use (and there are many others besides the ones I have mentioned) the data it provides you is very useful indeed. Look for overall trends and analyse how visitors interact with your website. Doing this on a regular basis can improve the performance of your website in a big way.
