Track Your Traffic

One thing you MUST do as a website owner who depends on traffic for potential sales is to closely monitor where your traffic is coming from. I use Google Analytics for all of my websites. It is absolutely, without a doubt, the most comprehensive stat and traffic monitor available, in my opinion.

To use GA, you just need sign up on their website and then add some code to your site’s template. The code will not be visible on the site, as it works behind the scenes. But within a day or two, GA will start tracking tons of information about your website traffic. Here are some examples:

How many actual visits your site gets per day, with stats on actual number of visits per day in the last month.

How many pageviews per day in the last month.

How many pages per visit.

Average time spent on site per visitor.

What percentage of visitors are new visitors.

What browser the visitors use.

What connection speed they have for the Internet.

What languages the visitors speak.

What countries/states/provinces/cities etc the visitors are from and exactly how many visited from each of those listed…plus how many pages they visited and length of each visit.

An overview of all your main traffic sources and the percentage of traffic from each: Referring Sites (like from paid ads and link exchanges you do), Search Engines (showing what SE’s were used and how many times, and what keywords folks used in their searches that led them to your site), and Direct Traffic (meaning those who typed in your exact URL to go to your website).

The paths the visitors took–from one page to another–on your site, including the pages they started on on where they exited.

And believe it or not, there is even more information available than this! It is unbelievable how much information GA provides…and even more unbelievable as to why everyone doesn’t use it!

If you pay for advertising, this kind of traffic monitoring is especially important, as it allows you to track the traffic that is coming from those paid ads. If you’re not getting the hits from those ads, then you know not to keep your ad on the site when it’s up for renewal. This is also a great way to see which of your link exchanges are benefiting you and which are not.

If you’re interested in Google Analytics…visit them here to sign up: