2012-02-27

How to Monitor Your Website Traffic

Understanding how people are getting to your website and knowing what they are looking at once they are at your website is crucial to improving your online marketing efforts.

By using website analytic tools, you can determine the effectiveness of your various online campaigns.

One such website analytic tool is Google Analytics from Google.com. Once installed, this free tool provides you with important website statistics such as:
  • how many visitors per day to your website
  • what keywords were used to find your website
  • how long visitors stayed on your website
  • which pages are more popular on your website
  • effectiveness of your Google AdWords ads
  • what pages visited first saw
  • what links in your website were clicked
Adding Google Analytics to your website involves signing up at http://www.google.com/analytics and then copying and pasting a few lines of HTML code into all your webpages (or pasting once into your common header file). If your website is based on WordPress, install and configure the Google Analyticator plugin. Once installed, wait at least 24 hours for some data to be collected.

Once you have Google Analytics installed, you can gain a better understanding of the behaviour of visitors to your website. And once you have that understanding, you can go about improving your website content and improving your online marketing campaigns.