Tracking your Website Visitors

Website statistics display how well your website is doing and what content seems to be the most popular.

Google Analytics is a powerful (and free) reporting tool for capturing the "who, where, and how" of your website visitors.

With Google Analytics, you're able to see:
- How many unique visitors & pageviews your website receives
- Where visitors are coming from (search engines, sites linking to yours, etc.)
- How long visitors stay
- What keywords are being used to find your site
- Technical information about your visitors computer (resolution, operating system, etc.)

There are a lot of different types of statistics to track and Google Analytics offers advanced reporting tools; however, below are a description of a few key statistics to track when you first get started with any tracking tool.

Visits – Analytics measure both visits and visitors in your account. Visits represent the number of times the website was visited, without regard to repeat visitors. Visitors represent the number of people that visited your site.

Most Popular Pages – This is a record of the pages on your website that are getting the most traffic, and which are not doing so well? Look at popular pages and their traffic sources to figure out what your doing right and how to best repeat your success.

Who Links to You? – This tracks websites and search engines that are sending you the most traffic.

Keyword Based Traffic – This is a great report that will display what keywords are being used to find your website through search engines. This will also help you determine the type of keywords you should be targeting or if your website needs to be optimized for your keywords.

Bounce Rate - The Bounce rate is a statistic of how long each visit lasted, revealing how many people come to your site and leave without going any further. Analytics will let you view your bounce rate over time, and see how it varies from page to page. For example, if you have multiple landing pages, those with a higher bounce rate should probably be updated to increase visitor interaction.

Other Website Analytic Tools

Goingup! is another excellent tracking tool and offers a variety of statistical data visually. Goingup! also includes a collection of SEO-related tools.

If you live on your iPhone, Clicky is a great option. It has a lot of great features and is one of the few website tracking tools you can use from your iPhone.

Some people are committed Google Analytic users, then there are others who swear by Woopra as the most comprehensive website analysis tool.

Piwik has all the features you can expect from analysis application and can be installed on your hosting account. Its main advantage is that its features come in the form of plugins and the user interface is fully customizable.

You can always start with the website analysis tools in your web hosting account like AWSTATS and Webalizer, but sooner or later you will feel the need to find more tools and get more data.