Janric Website Design

Knowing how much website traffic you have is vital. By careful monitoring you can actually increase your visitors. But, how do you do it cheaply and effectively?

There are many different applications to monitor your website traffic, many free, some paid for. But, as a website owner you need to know how many people are finding your website and how they are finding your website in order to be able to target your traffic building schemes.

So first, what is a suitable tool for tracking your website traffic? Well the most popular tool is also a free tool and it should come as no surprise that it is from the master of the internet, Google.

Google’s Analytics program is the best website traffic tool that I have seen, by a long way. And I have tried many similar tools for tracking, some free and some paid for. But, Analytics tells you a lot about your visitors that you will want to know, and a lot more besides.

Sign up for an account, spend 2 minutes installing the code to the footer of your website and come back the next day to review your stats.

It is almost that easy. On occasion you might get some strange data reported or want immediate access to your statistics. If, for example, you are running an advert on the radio then it is likely that through the day you will want to watch its effect. But Analytics does not handle this. In fact, there is currently no hour by hour reporting, just day by day.

So it is also well worth installing a reporting tool that gives you immediate feedback, but not so much detail and power as Analytics. For blogs I use WordPress Stats, there will be equivalents for other blogs and other free tools for websites.

With a pair of statistics tools implemented you are ready to watch your traffic whenever you need to whilst having the backup that if one shows some funny data, you can cross check with the other whether the data is wrong or your website is experiencing something strange.

Now that you have your traffic tracking in place, it is just a matter of watching what is happening. Take a look at what keyword terms are sending you traffic and which pages are receiving traffic and use that to make changes. For example, I noticed that one informational page on my own website was getting a lot of traffic for people looking for a service I didn’t offer, but I was able to add an affiliate link for these visitors.

Once you have implemented a couple of tools it can be quite good fun to experiment with them and to learn your way around them. Hopefully, in the process, you will discover the secrets of your own website traffic and learn how to increase it.

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2. What does Alexa Ranking tell us?
3. Evidence That Search Engine Results Are Based On Traffic
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5. The Importance Of Checking Your Daily Traffic Logs Part 2
6. Getting More Free Web Traffic – Part 11, How Often Should I Write Articles?
7. The Problem With WordPress
8. Build Traffic From Within
9. 9 Essential WordPress Plugins For Every Blog
10. Blogging Visitors Tip – More Traffic In Merely 10 Minutes