Lesson 6

Tracking your Website Traffic

Incredibly this was something that I wasn’t doing until the Guru got me in a head lock and beat some sense in to me.  

I had used XSitePro and another great website building program HyperVRE to build some attractive websites but I had no idea where the visitors were coming from or how long they were staying.

Have a look at the following video that explains Google’s free program analytics.

http://www.googleanalytics.com

And just scroll down until you see the tour it’s a great video.

The following headings below give you a feel for just how powerful Google Analytics can be for you. 

Visitors – will show you where your site visitors come from.

Traffic Sources – will detail for you if your traffic was direct, from a referring site or from a search engine.  See below

I put a test site up and did a blog post about the site to drive just a trickle of traffic but you can see how handy having such detailed free analysis of a site can be. The graph above shows me the number of visitors I am getting but also look at the amount of data I get about my visitors below.

This incredible FREE program that Google offers tells me (1) the number of visitors, (2) the unique visitors and (3) page views and so on.

I can even see the type of browsers that my visitors are using and make appropriate adjustments by looking at the websites in fire fox if a large amount of visitors are using that browser.                         

Content – will show you the actual pages in your site that a visitor looks at and the keywords a visitors clicked on to enter your site.   See below.

If you are new online it is inevitable that eventually you will get a domain name and build your own website so having a close look at Google analytics and watching the videos at the analytics site is a worthwhile time investment.

As you can see getting this amount of information FREE after paying your $10.00 Google joining fee has to be incredible value.

 http://www.googleanalytics.com

Other statistics that Google Analytics will give you

Visitor Profile - languages, network, locations

Browser Profile - browsers, operating systems, browser and operating systems, screen colors, resolutions, java support.

This resource is a must have for you and it is free and simple to install on your website. 

I really want to stress to you how important this is.  So look at the following screen shots and think for a moment of the value of free information and how it can help in developing your road map on line.

A simple pie chart on where your traffic is coming from so you can quickly analyze how to spend your advertising dollar and where to invest your time.

An overlay map of where my traffic is coming from and a detailed analysis below with some stats to help me plan my budget and time investment.

What incredible FREE information to have about website traffic.

Clearly the U.S.A is the dominate force in most on line markets but I do have one Ad sense website that is very nationalistic and it gets 97% of its traffic from Japan.

If you would like to take your site tracking one step further.  This costs a little bit per month but is much more automated.

Click <<<here >>> to visit Adminder

I use this company and find them fantastic.  Their pop under ads are also something we use.