How to find free website traffic monitoring tools13 October 2005
Website traffic monitoring tools, such as counters and tracking software, can help you to understand who is visiting your website and why. These tools help you to monitor your online traffic and can give you a broader understanding of what potential customers are looking at when they land on your site.
They also tell you who your visitors are and which websites they are coming from, and some will let you know what keywords and phrases people coming to your site from a search engine have used.
This useful article provides a guide to the types of statistics and information you may want to collate.
Methods of monitoring your website traffic include:
- Counters, which are the simplest method of monitoring your website traffic. These can be visible to visitors or invisible, and 'count' the number of visitors to your site. However, they can be unreliable (the numbers can be easily altered), and for this reason they are mainly used on personal web pages. This useful guide provides links to a number of free and easy to use counters.
- Tracking software goes a step further and incorporates a counter with additional reporting statistics. These tools can provide information on the number of returning and first-time visitors to your site, which of your site's pages are most popular, the site the visitor was referred from, and keyword analysis. Statcounter, WebSTAT, Site Meter and SiteTracker are examples of tracking software with varying degrees of functionality.
- The log files from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can also be used to monitor website traffic. Your ISP keeps a record of every request made to the server, so you can find out how visitors got to your site and how they navigate through it. However, this data often needs to be interpreted using a statistical analysis package such as Webalizer or Web Trends. Your ISP may also offer a free analysis package.
Monitoring other sites
It is also possible to use website monitoring tools to find out who is visiting your competitors' websites. Services such as Alexa and A9 provide information about a given site's traffic rank, the speed of the site and links that it has to other sites.
