17. Tracking Visitors

In the last chapter we had a brief look at Link Reputation and how that can help your ranking for a keyword. Today, I want to briefly cover one of the most important parts of creating a successful website – tracking your visitors.

It is vital that you know statistics about your visitors.

The more information you have on your visitors behaviour, the better equipped you will be to make your site better, and ultimately more profitable.

Most web hosts provide a standard statistical package pre-installed that will give you most of the information you require. Often, this is AWStats, which is very good.

It your host does not supply this, there are some great scripts available that will provide tracking for you.

One free popular stat counter is Stat Counter.

The only problem with some of the free solutions is that the code you insert onto your page displays a graphic on your page. This does look unprofessional, so you should look for a script that you can install that does not require this. E.g. here is the graphic shown for one of these free stat counters:

.

This will be shown on all your pages.

You can find a lot more free and cheap solutions by searching Google for "web stats script", or by visiting one of many script sites like Scripts.com.

The script I use on my sites is called Advance Logger.

It is not free, but it is one of the best (if not the best) available.

Let’s look at the kinds of information these stats programs provide, and see how that information is valuable to us as webmasters. I am going to show you the information provided by Advance Logger, but most stats packages provide similar information .

Here is a list of information provided by Advance Logger.

Hourly, Daily, monthly stats which provide you with summaries of how many visitors your site got in those time periods. e.g. it is often interesting to look at the monthly summary for a site to see how traffic has grown, or see seasonal trends in your traffic.

Here is a screenshot of the menu system in Advance Logger:

These summaries can be drilled down into more specific information. For example, I can pull up a report to look at my last few visitors. This shows me all visitors that have been at my site in the last few months, with the most recent visitors appearing first in the list. For each visitor I am given the following information:

How they found the site. Did they come in via a bookmark, or a search engine. If they came via a search engine, what phrase did they type to find my page. I can even click on a link here to visit the search engine results to see where my page is for that term.

This is very interesting information, as it helps identify what terms my pages are ranking well for.

I also get the IP address of the visitor (which Advance Logger uses to create a report showing where in the world my visitor came from), a date and time of the visit, and how many pages the visitor viewed before leaving. I can even get a list of the pages visited, and in which order they were visited and at what time each page was visited. This information is very valuable to me. It shows me the sequence of my visitors visit, and gives me a little more information on what exactly my visitor was interested in.

Other information provided by Advance Logger is the Operating system of my user, and the screen resolution they were using.

Top make things easier, Advance Logger gives me several "Top…" reports.

Top Referrer tells me who has referred the most traffic. This is very useful to quickly see where your traffic is and isn’t coming from.

A quick look at the site above shows that 6.41% of traffic is from Yahoo, 6.16% from Google, 5.67% from MSN. I can click a link for each of these sources to show me what keywords my pages are found for at each of the engines. What phrase is your site found for most often? This report will tell you.

I have covered up the exact keywords to maintain anonymity for this site (it is one of my client’s sites).

All this is great information to know as it can show you referrers that you were not aware of (link partners or directories), as well as tell you which engines you need to work on a little more.

Another great report is the Top Pages report. This shows me instantly which pages get the most traffic. I can quickly see which pages require more inbound links to help them rank better. That is invaluable information.

I can get reports for:

Top Browsers (great for making sure your site is compatible)

Top operating systems

Top IP addresses

Top screen resolutions

Top country info (i.e. which countries provide my site with the most traffic?).

Finally, the software can provide me two very important reports:

Top entry page, and top exit pages.

These reports show which pages visitors enter and leave my site.

Is there one page where most people leave the site? If so why? If it is the order page, then that’s great, but if it is another page, I know that I need to look at that page and fix whatever it is that is sending my visitors packing.

As you can see, the types of information that this type of software can provide is very valuable. A site without this data is a site that cannot ever achieve its full potential.

If you are not yet using a stats program on your site, now is the time to find one that suites your needs. I suggest that if money is tight, you pick a fre-e script, and then switch to a better script when money allows.

Most of these scripts are easy to use. Often, all it takes is to install the script on your server, and then paste some code into each of your web pages. If you are using a template based web editor like SEO WSB, you can add the tracking code directly to the templates, so that all pages are compiled with the tracking code.

If you are using an editor like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, a search and replace function will get the code into all pages. e.g. if your tracking code needs to be placed at the end of your web page, before the closing </body> tag, do a search and replace:

Search for </body> and replace it with:

**The Tracking code**

</body>

This is easy in Dreamweaver. I don’t use Frontpage, but assume it must have a similar search and replace feature.

OK, so hopefully I have convinced you to get a stats package installed on your site. That is the first step. Once installed, the hard work begins. You then need to look at these stats on a daily or weekly basis (at least early on), so that you can make informed decisions on how best to improve the site.

Don’t work blind, work smart!

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