How To Monitor Website Traffic

Are you monitoring your website traffic?
Is your traffic increasing each month?
Where are your visitors coming from?
What keywords are they using to find your website?

Without answering these questions you’ll have no idea if your marketing strategies are working effectively. Traffic is the lifeblood of your online business. If you don’t monitor and analyze your traffic you won’t know what to change to make your online business successful.

Here are 2 Free Tools to Monitor Your Website Traffic

1. Awstats

If your website is hosted on a Linux server you’ll have access to the web hosting control panel (cpanel). Look for Awstats under “Analysis and Log Files.”

Here’s a summary of the most important stats you’ll see displayed:

• Number of unique visitors, visits, pages, hits and bandwidth (displayed by month, week, day and hour).
• Countries your visitors are coming from.
• Top 25 web pages accessed
• Browsers used to find your website (ie Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari).
• Operating systems (ie Windows, Mac, Linux).
• Links from external pages (not search engines)
• Keywords and keyphrases used to find your web pages

The best way to use Awstats is to watch for trends each month. For example if most visitors are using Google Chrome to view your website make sure it displays correctly in that browser otherwise visitors will leave immediately.

Video: How To Monitor Website Traffic Using Awstats

2. Google Analytics

This free tool offered by Google gives you even more comprehensive statistics than Awstats. To use it you just need to sign up for a Google Analytics account then copy and paste the code provided into each html page. It’s even easier if your website is built on WordPress because you can install and activate a Google Analytics plugin.

The main stat categories and sub categories include:

Audience

• Overview
• Demographics
• Behaviour
• Technology
• Mobile
• Custom
• Visitors Flow

Advertising (only applicable to AdWords)

Traffic Sources

• Overview
• Sources
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social

Content

• Overview
• Site Content
• Site Speed
• Site Search
• Events
• Adsense
• In-Page Analytics

Conversions

• Goals
• Ecommerce
• Multi-Channel Functions

I won’t bore you with the explanations for each category and sub category but will stress the importance of monitoring where most of your traffic is coming from ie organic or paid search, social (e.g. Facebook, Google+, Twitter) and the keywords used to find your website.

Video: How To Monitor Website Traffic Using Google Analytics

Example 1
If your traffic is mainly coming from one source (ie Google) it would be worthwhile to diversify your marketing strategies so you don’t have all your eggs in one basket. For example include social media to expand your audience.

Example 2
Monitoring the keywords visitors are using to find your site will enable you to create new content based on these keywords. This will allow the search engines to find and rank the new content resulting in more visitors and sales.

Other important stats to monitor

Demographics-Location
Know which countries most of your traffic is coming from. For example if you receive lots of Spanish visitors it would be worth offering a Spanish version of your website to attract and retain Spanish speaking visitors.

Demographics-Behaviour-New vs Returning
A high rate of returning visitors would indicate your content is valuable enough for visitors to keep coming back for more.

Demographics-Behaviour-Engagement
This displays how long a visitor remains on your web pages (bounce rate). Google takes this into account when ranking websites. A high bounce rate means visitors don’t like or can’t find the information they want and will leave almost immediately.

Demographics-Behaviour-Mobile
If many visitors are accessing your website from a mobile device make sure you have a mobile version to redirect visitors to otherwise you’ll lose them resulting in lost sales.

By monitoring and analyzing your website traffic on a consistent basis (at least every month)you’ll be able to see which marketing strategies are successful then change them accordingly to generate more sales.

Video: How To Monitor Your Website Traffic

Unique Visitors Vs Total Visitors – Which is More Important?
How to Get Effective Web Stats for Your Website
How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic
Website Design FAQ: 10 questions to ask yourself before designing a web site

If you want to receive more content like this
SUBSCRIBE to my Marketing Tips Newsletter