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* 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 theperformance of your website and turn more visitors into customers - AND - get morequality 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, anyattempts at growing your traffic and improving the profitability of your website isworking with one armed tied behind your back, at least.
And unfortunately - the web stats that come with your web-hosting are generally notenough 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 storesof everyone that visits and presents this in an easy to understand way.
Unfortunately, due to a number of technical reasons, this information is oftenpresented in quite an inaccurate way.
And in my personal experience, these software packages don't present thisinformation in a particularly helpful way either for someone trying to improve theconversion 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 andunderstand way. These solutions come in two forms: Software & Services
Both these options have their pros and cons, but what they both do very well ispresent exactly what's happening on your website right up to the minute, and in away that's very helpful to you for making good (and profitable) decisions for yourbusiness.
To start with here's a software solution you can install and use for free on yourwebsite:
Now before you go and install it, you should of course be familiar with installingsoftware on your server. If you're not comfortable installing software on yourwebsite, a tracking service (which I'll come to in a moment) would probably be bestfor you.
And it's also important to note that installing software on your website can oftenput more strain on the server. This is particularly true if you're on sharedhosting.
I've personally used the following free tracking software and it works well. Seewhat you think. Go to http://www.curve2.com and look for "TrackPro". As I writethis, version 2 is in Beta and is downloadable from the site at the followingaddress: http://www.curve2.com/trackpro .php
You'll also find many further free tracking software solutions athttp://www.hotscripts.com.
But personally speaking, what I've found works very well and avoids putting anyincreased 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 yourtracking codes on your pages too.)* What is their privacy policy regarding my web stats? (Are they honest andtrustworthy in other words. You don't want the service owners studying and thenduplicating your successful business plan.)
Over the past month I've been using ecommStats. Now, this service isn't free, but atthis time they give you 50,000 free page views per domain, and depending how busyyour 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 threelines of code at the bottom of each of your pages (you can easily do this withServer Side Includes if you're comfortable with that) and all your visitors gettracked accurately and in great detail.
Alternatively - an entirely free (at this time) and very established service isStatCounter. It even has a rave review from Tucows.com (one of the largest downloadsites on the internet) which speaks for itself and adds a lot of credibility to theservice.
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 veryeasy for them to sell a lot of advertising on their site. They also offer an upgradeto their advanced paid service.
But thinking beyond free services, as your business grows you may choose to upgradeto high end paid services that provide even more in depth information about yourvisitors...
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 eyeon what your visitors are doing and where they're coming from and free trackingsoftware and services is a great way for you to start to do this.
