If you don’t know anything about where your visitors are coming from or how many your getting, your missing out on some very key information. Tracking where your visitors come from is key to optimizing the way you promote your site.

Tracking visitors as they browse a web site can also provide a great marketing tool with many other great statistics. By helping you learn how your visitors view your web site and what gets viewed most often, you can tailor the site to best meet your visitors’ needs and better judge which marketing tactics are working and which ones are not. Tracking the number of visitors and where they came from can provide even more great statistics for determining popular pages, top marketing techniques, and much more.

Where Do They Come From?

When promoting, or marketing, your web site, there are so many things you can do that draw traffic from different places. Without some way of measuring the success of different marketing techniques, there is a good chance you are wasting valuable time promoting your site in ways that just aren’t worth the time and effort for the amount of visitors you get in return. On the flip-side, there are most likely a few techniques you are already using that are generating the majority of your traffic. By tracking where all your visitors come from, you can generally see what had the most success in attracting targeted visitors to your web site. Did they see the web page’s listing in a search engine or did they find your site from a link on someone else’s page? Maybe they saw your domain name somewhere and typed it in the address bar. Having this information can tell you where most of your traffic is coming from, which search terms the web page is coming up under and much more.

At the lowest level, tracking visitors provides a way to count how many people have visited each of your pages. This can show you which pages are getting the most traffic and the general popularity of your web site and each page. However there is also a bunch of other information which can be collected and used to provide other statistics. For instance, you can also track how visitors move through the site, page to page, as well as how long they stay at each page. This can show you what is drawing the visitors’ attention as they browse through your web site. In addition to page popularity and related statistics, there is also much more information which can be collected and stored which can provide even more vision into who your visitors are and how they see your web site.

Tracking a visitor’s IP address can also provide a great deal of information about your visitors such as where the user is located in the world and what internet service provider they are using. This can help you further target your audience based on what type of visitors you are receiving, track their movements on your site over a period of time, and much more. In addition to who and where visitors are, you can also see how they are viewing your web site. From what operating system they are running to which web browser and what version they are using and more, there are some great statistics with important information. One important piece of information to track is the resolution your visitors are viewing your web site at. Your web site’s width should be optimized for displaying at a resolution that is best for the majority of your visitors. Also considering how much space you have before the user has to scroll down can play a big part in the design of the top of your web site. Another important statistic is how many visitors have JavaScript disabled. Many people are beginning to restrict web sites from running JavaScripts by default. If JavaScript provides a required function on the web site but many of your visitors disable there JavaScript, an alternative may need to be implemented.

So I need to track my visitors…how?

Tracking visitors is not a hard thing to do. In fact, even the cheapest web hosts include visitor tracking and logging to some degree. There are also several third-party services that provide a light-weight plugin to provide a comprehensive analysis of visitors to the site. I have checked with three different web hosting services and they all provide the same tracking features: raw data logs, a poor program called Webalizer, and a comprehensive program called AWstats. Although AWstats provides a great deal of information, statistics, as well as charts and graphs, the way it is all presented is somewhat disorganized and inefficient. This is true especially when compared to leading third-party services which provide intuitive interfaces as well as complete and comprehensive statistics with well organized charts and graphs.

Two of the leading third-party tracking services are StatCounter and GoStats. Both have free services that provide the same statistics as AWstats, however the interface is much more user friendly and the information is much better organized and laid out, providing a great source for viewing and comparing important statistics. Both have great intuitive interfaces, but each organizes and displays the data a little differently. StatCounter separates more information across several different pages and provides a drill-down tool to get more information and reference other ways of seeing the same or similar statistics. GoStats provides some of the same features, but instead provides a great summary page with summarized details from the most important statistics. Both are unique in how they display the data and depending on how you want to see things, what one considers a disadvantage may be an advantage to someone else, and vice-versa.

Since third-party services provide a much better interface for viewing and understanding the many statistics available, I suggest you not use the web hosting service’s statistics program and instead use one of these third-party services. I myself believe GoStats has a superior interface than StatCounter for quickly reviewing a summary a web site’s traffic, yet it still provides the detailed, comprehensive statistics for deep analysis. Both run light-weight scripts that can be added to the end of each web page, so the visitors should see no change in how fast the page takes to load. If you prefer, we can even install scripts from both services for further comparison and to see what the personal preferences are of those who will be using its interface to view the statistics. One interface may prove to be more efficient than another, only testing and regular use of each will tell.

One more service takes a different approach to tracking your visitors, a very interesting one too! How would you like to see exactly what your visitors see? How about videos recordings of your visitors screen as they browse your web site? Impossible you say? Not anymore! A free service called ClickTale literally records videos of your visitors as they browse your pages – down to mouse movements, clicks, and even form fields! If anything, this is just too cool! Even better, you can now tell whether users are actually reading your content or just scrolling through, you can see the flow your visitors go through to decide where to go next. I had to try it out and I have to say it is awesome!

Anyway, once you have collected a good sized collection of statistics, you will have a good view of who is viewing the web site and how they are viewing it. By tailoring the pages of the site to better serve its visitors, they will have a much better experience as they browse your pages and you will gain more insight into how and where they are going on your web site. With a third-party service providing great tools to view those statistics, understanding your traffic has never been easier.