How To Track All Your Website Traffic For Free

Copyright © 2005 Louis Allport

Do you know:

* Exactly how many people are visiting your website?
* How long they're staying on your site before they move on?
* Exactly where those visitors are coming from, each day?
* How much of your website traffic is repeat visitors?
* The exact paths people take as they click their way
through your website?

Here's what I'm getting at:

If you don't know your visitors, it makes it *very*
difficult for you to improve the performance of your website
and turn more visitors into customers - AND - get more
quality traffic. For the simple reason that you're
effectively working blind.

Without knowing how people visit your site and what they do
on your site, any attempts at growing your traffic and
improving the profitability of your website is working with
one armed tied behind your back, at least.

And unfortunately - the web stats that come with your web-
hosting are generally not enough these days.

Depending on your web host, chances are you've either got
Webalizer, Analog Stats, or AWStats installed on your
server. Here's how that software works:

It takes the "raw" (unreadable to the human eye) information
your web server stores of everyone that visits and presents
this in an easy to understand way.

Unfortunately, due to a number of technical reasons, this
information is often presented in quite an inaccurate way.

And in my personal experience, these software packages don't
present this information in a particularly helpful way
either for someone trying to improve the conversion ratios
and profitability of their website.

What I personally do, and what I would suggest you do is use
a "Tracking Solution" that accurately tracks and reports all
your visitors in an easy to read and understand way. These
solutions come in two forms: Software & Services

Both these options have their pros and cons, but what they
both do very well is present exactly what's happening on
your website right up to the minute, and in a way that's
very helpful to you for making good (and profitable)
decisions for your business.

To start with here's a software solution you can install and
use for free on your website:

Now before you go and install it, you should of course be
familiar with installing software on your server. If you're
not comfortable installing software on your website, a
tracking service (which I'll come to in a moment) would
probably be best for you.

And it's also important to note that installing software on
your website can often put more strain on the server. This
is particularly true if you're on shared hosting.

I've personally used the following free tracking software
and it works well. See what you think. Go to
http://www.curve2.com and look for "TrackPro". As I write
this, version 2 is in Beta and is downloadable from the site
at the following address: http://www.curve2.com/trackpro.php

You'll also find many further free tracking software
solutions at http://www.hotscripts.com.

But personally speaking, what I've found works very well and
avoids putting any increased strain on my existing websites
is using a third party tracking service.

The only things really to worry about when using a third
party service are:

* How long will this service be around? (If they stop their
service after a year, you wouldn't be able to access your
past data and will have to change all your tracking codes on
your pages too.)
* What is their privacy policy regarding my web stats? (Are
they honest and trustworthy in other words. You don't want
the service owners studying and then duplicating your
successful business plan.)

Over the past month I've been using ecommStats (
http://www.ecommstats.com). Now, this service isn't free,
but at this time they give you 50,000 free page views per
domain, and depending how busy your site is those page views
can last you a very long time.

The service works great and is very easy to add to your
pages -- simply add three lines of code at the bottom of
each of your pages (you can easily do this with Server Side
Includes if you're comfortable with that) and all your
visitors get tracked accurately and in great detail.

Alternatively - an entirely free (at this time) and very
established service is StatCounter (http://statcounter.com).
It even has a rave review from Tucows.com (one of the
largest download sites on the internet) which speaks for
itself and adds a lot of credibility to the service.

And just in case you're wondering how a free service like
StatCounter makes money, well - since it's such a popular
service with many webmasters logging in every day (and many
I'm sure even more than once a day just like me) that it's
made it very easy for them to sell a lot of advertising on
their site. They also offer an upgrade to their advanced
paid service.

But thinking beyond free services, as your business grows
you may choose to upgrade to high end paid services that
provide even more in depth information about your
visitors...

Services like Urchin (Urchin.com - owned by Google) or Deep
Metrix (DeepMetix.com). However, to help you grow your
business to that point you need to keep a close eye on what
your visitors are doing and where they're coming from, and
free tracking software and services is a great way for you
to start to do this.

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Louis Allport is an online product developer and marketer
and recently revealed a simple and *proven* four-step
formula for creating best-selling products practically on
demand: http://www.createoffers.com