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Finding out how many people are visiting your website and where they came from is a fundamental part of your internet marketing. If you don’t know this information, it’s very difficult to make informed decisions as to which part of your marketing is actually working.
So, what can you do about setting up website tracking and understand what all the stats mean?
Firstly, find out if your web hosting company provides visitor tracking with your account. Most web hosting companies do provide stats although the quality of these stats can vary enormously from almost useless information, such as Webalizer to AW Stats, which is quite good. If your web host’s visitor tracking is poor or non-existent, you do have alternatives ranging from free to cheap to quite expensive!
Chances are, if you’re reading this blog post, you’re a small business, so I won’t cover the paid options. So here are a couple of good free options:
1. Google Analytics
Google’s free website tracking provides a huge amount of useful information so that you can really determine which aspects of your online marketing are working the best. There are a lot of stats provided which can be a bit daunting at first, but once you have a basic understanding, you’ll find it very useful. One option to make the most of is ‘goals’ which allows you to track either sales or online forms on your website and find out exactly where those who bought or enquired came from – really important information! Setting it up will either involve you adding a script to your web pages, or you can ask a techie to do it for you.
2. Statcounter
Statcounter is another free web tracking software service, and although doesn’t provide as in depth information as Google Analytics, is not bad nonetheless. If you’re after a basic alternative to the rather poor Webalizer, or you have no tracking at all, then this will give you the information about your visitors that you need. Setting up Statcounter is similar to Google Analytics, you can either add the code onto the pages yourself, or ask a techie to do it for you.
You can run either of the above alongside your web hosting stats if you want as well, although you may find the stats aren't quite the same as different web stats packages seem to measure traffic in different ways (just to add to confusion!).
As for understanding what all the stats mean, I’ll cover it in a future blog post!
