Web Site Tracking With Web Traffic Analysis Software

Here's an overview of the kind of web site tracking information you can get access to:

Number of Visitors (also visits, hits, pages). Find out exactly how many people visited your site, and each page within it. You can also find out how long they stayed, how many pages they looked at, how many were new vs return visits, and how many simply "bounced" away from your site (arrived on a page then left immediately).

Characteristics of your visitors.
You can see what technology your visitors are using (browser, operating system, screen size and connection speed), and where they come from in the world.

Where your visitors came from
Whether they arrived from a search engine, through a link from another site, or directly (eg via a browser bookmark or favorite). It's very useful to see which incoming links are bringing visitors - can you get more similar ones? - and even the keywords used to find your site in the search engines - you'll be amazed how many key phrases show up once you have some history to look at.

Advertising performance
Most forms of advertising can be tagged in some way so you can slice up your data to see which ads are driving traffic.

Conversion and Goal Performance
You'll often have some specific things that you want your visitors to do. The right web traffic analysis software can track when your visitors do what you want them to do, and often which ads or incoming search terms brought them to your site.

Page/Content performance
You can slice and dice the data for each individual page on your site, so you can see which pieces of your content are doing what you want them to do (attracting traffic, driving conversions, funneling traffic to another location) and which need some improvement.

Basic "Traffic Counter", "Hit Counter" or "Visitor Counter"
These are often free scripts consisting of a snippet of code which you add to the pages you want counted. The statistics and analysis available are often very basic and limited. Be aware that here's a big difference between "hits" and "visitors": one visitor will cause multiple hits. For accurate numbers you want something that counts visitors. You can often get a script like this with your web site hosting.

However, for the same amount of work integrating one of these into your site you can use a free script-based analytics service which will give you WAY more data.

Script-based web analytics software
The best example of this genre is Google Analytics, which is free and can easily be added to your web site or blog. You get a huge amount of data and analysis. Downsides are that by default the reports are delayed by 1 day (though you can change the date ranges to include the current day), and you're giving Google a lot of information about your site.

Server-Based Web Log Analysis Software
This software resides on your web server and serves only you, instead of being out "in the cloud" like the script-based Google Analytics type solutions. Many web hosting packages come with web log analysis software built in for free. There are also larger and much more powerful packages available for a price.