Website Visitor Tracking

Visitor traffic is crucial to the success of a Website. This is common knowledge. If you do not know how many views your pages get, how can you know if anyone is seeing your site, product or service? With an online business, you can not afford to guess at how effective your marketing, content, message or Website design is.

Ideally, you need to know what pages are viewed, how long the visitor stays on any given page and what page they click to next. Also, if you can see the keywords they used to search for you, or see what link they clicked to get to your site (referral link), you have great information for SEO (search engine optimization) of your site content and keywords. This is all part of Website visitor tracking, also known as Web analytics.

The more you know about analytics, the better prepared you will be to get the most out of your site traffic and visitor usage. Following are some good basic points that will help you use your reports to best boost your site's effectiveness.

• Who are your visitors? - Identify your target market, focus your keywords, and optimize your content for this market. Find your optimal visitors by geography, interest, demographics and other important criteria, and get the attention of potential customers or clients.
  
  
• What are your visitors searching for? - Work on your search engine optimization (SEO) and refine your keyword strategies. Watch your visitors' clickstream (click path) data. Monitor the keywords your visitors use to find you, as well as the search engines they used. This information relates what your visitors are looking for, how effective your keywords are, and lets you know what search engines have you listed.
  
  
• When do they visit my site? - Monitor your peak traffic hours, by year, month, week, day and hour. This is important information, but you really need more than just "visitor totals." You should track time breakdown by page views (total views of every page on your site) and by unique visitors (pages viewed by each individual visitor).
  
  
• Where are visitors coming from? - When you begin marketing your site, whether it is banner and link exchanges, classified ads, posting articles, press releases or pay per click advertising, you need to know what is working for you and what is wasting your time. Referral link reports help narrow this down and allow you to see what active links on the Internet are being used to bring site visitors.
  
  
• Why is all this so important? - If you do not have reports to give you the real-time traffic information necessary to gauge visitor performance, how can you know how your site is really doing? Are you thinking some decent sales is doing well? Or because you get nice feedback, the site is ok? If this is the case, you are settling for inferior results. Why would you want to settle for "ok" when you can get the tools at little expense that can make your site soar?

How do they use my Website? - By knowing how visitors are actually using your site, which pages they visit, how long they view the pages they visit, what pages compel them to continue inside the site (clickstream), and what pages they use to leave your site (exit page) will tell you a great deal.