You’ve probably heard the saying a website is useless without visitors before, but isn’t it also true that owning a website is pointless if you don’t even know how many visitors you’re getting? I don’t know about you, but I always like to know exactly how many visitors I’m getting each day, where they came from, and any other information I can get. Nowadays there are several programs to do this – some built in to cheap web hosting plans, some from 3rd-party developers.
Most cheap web hosting plans have some sort of traffic tracker, but it’s usually very primative. Most of them just give you the number of visitors, but no other information. If you want more information, I recommend using a 3rd-party tracker such as Google Analytics. If you just want the basic figures so you can understand how many hits you’re getting daily, then the tracker built in to your cheap web hosting will do just fine.
There are many 3rd-party traffic analytics tools, but Google Analytics is the most popular, and the best in most people’s opinions. Plus, it’s free, so it’s a very useful tool for webmasters of all levels. Google Analytics is easy to set up – all you have to do is put a small piece of code (generated on the Analytics website) into the footer of your website. Then, all you have to do is make sure everything is working, and then watch your stats. Note that Google Analytics only updates once every 24 hours, as apposed to the cheap web hosting trackers, which usually update instantly. However, Google Analytics more than makes up for it in features. With Analytics, you can see not only how many visitors you got, but how they got to your site, what search terms they used, how long they stayed, and much more!
Written by Web Hosting Expert on Dec 30, 2009.
