Track your Site Visitors

Keeping track of your website visitors just makes good sense. Why wouldn’t you want to know how people are finding your site and what they’re doing once they’re there?

Most website hosting accounts include some type of visitor logs. ANA Design’s hosting cPanel has several – Awstats, Webalizer, and Latest Visitors. These programs can provide valuable information about your site visitors. In my experience, though, the amount of information they provide leaves much to be desired. That’s where external hit counters enter the story.

There are lots of hit counters out there. Just Google “website hit counter” or “website visitor tracking” and see what you get. Usually these services require you insert a small piece of javascript into your site pages. This bit of code links your site to your hit counter account. You then login to your account on the site you signed up with when you want to check out your stats.

My favorite hit counter is from www.statcounter.com. The account is free, easy to set up, and gives the best stats (imo). You can upgrade to a paid account for a small fee, which increases your log size. But all the great features are available with free accounts.

Do you ask the question “Why bother?” There are plenty of good reasons. Here’s three:

- If you pay for advertising, you should know how many hits you get from each ad. Don’t waste your money paying for ads if they’re not bringing you traffic.

- If your contact form returns the IP address of the person who filled it out, you can look for that IP on your hit counter. Good for screening purposes.

- If you care about search engines (and most sane website owners should), hit counters can tell you what search terms people are using to find your site, which search engines you’re getting referrals from, etc.

Monitoring your site’s traffic can be extremely beneficial for your business. It doesn’t take much time or effort to install an external hit counter on your site. Go ahead and do it. I bet you’ll be glad you did!