Monitor Your Web Traffic

Posted by Paul on April 11, 2012

I'm often surprised when I ask people how many visitors they get to their website and they're not sure. They could be getting between 1 or 1,000 per day but they really don't know which.

There are simple, free tools to do this and doing so can increase the ROI of your website.

Why Monitor Web Traffic?

  • You can find where the visitors are coming from.
    If a lot seems to come from a particular website, get more links on it and get links on other similar websites.
    Result: More Visitors 

  • You can find out what keywords people are using to get to your website and how you rank for them in the search engines. You may find people are using keywords you'd never thought of or realise that no one is getting to your site via the keywords you'd expect. Either way you can optimize you website further with this information.
    Result: More Visitors 

  • You can see which pages are popular and which pages never get visited, as well as those pages that people always seem to be on when they leave the site (Exit Pages). It's definitely worth improving those ones.
    Result: Happier Visitors 

  • You can see what devices, browsers and screen resolutions people are using and make sure you website works on all of these.
    Result: Happier Visitors
How to Monitor Traffic
While most people would recommend Google Analytics I'm quite fond of StatCounter because I find it easier to get right down to the detail of individual page loads. Either option will require you to sign up for an account and then for your web developer to add a small bit of code to your website.
 

Conclusion
Monitoring your visitors and more importantly responding to the information you discover will give you more and happier visitors who are more likely to convert in to sales.

(And yes I'm monitoring you right now!)

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