Enterprise Nation

An interesting piece on the Microsoft Small Business Centre site looks at why you should be tracking and monitoring website traffic and how best to go about it. We take a few excerpts that we think you’ll like. 

Do you know?

• How many visitors land on your website?
• Which pages are the most popular?
• Where do they come from and on which days do they visit the most?

If you have a website, measuring its performance and making improvements is the best way to increase the return you get from it.

Your website conversion rates measures how many visitors you're converting into customers. The best way to improve it is to know what your conversion rates are in the first place. They can be calculated by tracking your website traffic.

Where to start?

Your hosting company should provide free log files which reveal which websites referred traffic to your site and how many hits the website received. However, in their raw form, log files can be unmanageable and even misleading. Figuring out actual visitor numbers can be problematic.

Fortunately, website tracking software will check your logs, make sense of them and serve the information up in easily digestible form. From free to high-cost options, there are many packages available.

The solution you choose depends on how user-friendly and sophisticated you want your data to be. Freebies include Clicky, Analog and AWStats. More complex tools will display charts so you can spot trends.

You might want to find out how many site referrals came from banners or which keywords were used the most on search engines that led visitors to your site. Wusage can do all of this cheaply. Alternatively, Livestats and Opentracker include clickstream (to tell you which pages visitors look at in what order) and search term analysis.

Moving up the scale

Prices start to rise as you look at more sophisticated options like WebTrends and Sane Solutions' NetTracker. These can analyse shopping cart revenue and promotions for shopping sites.

You may need to try a few solutions before settling on the right one.

Here at Enterprise Nation we use Urchin which came as part of the package from our web development company and it seems to do the job pretty well.

Do you have any recommendations for measuring site traffic? Let us know about them here or in the forum.  

• Source: Tracking website traffic, via Microsoft small business website