Tracking your Web traffic can be highly useful in your marketing efforts. If you are using a good hosting company, they will provide server-side statistics programs like AWstats.
If your hosting company doesn't provide good server-side stats, you could use a free JavaScript-based visitor tracking system like Google Analytics. Installing Google Analytics on your Web site is relatively easy. It just involves copying and pasting a snippet of JavaScript code into the footer of your Web site template.
Google Analytics is a sophisticated tracking system. The following screenshot shows the basic overview screen:
You can use Analytics to track things like:
- How many visitors your site gets.
- Where your visitors are located, often even down to the exact city.
- What your most popular content is.
- What keywords are bringing traffic from search engines.
I recommend using a combination of Google Analytics and AWstats. If you have good hosting company (like Site5.com), AWstats will come with the hosting package.
