Understanding Traffic To Your Site Is Important by Chris Steingart

If you own a retail store and at the end of each day, week, month, and year would be able to pull up some info on how many people came in the door, where they came from, how long they stayed, what locations in the store they visited, who referred them and if they spent any money in your store - all without ever asking them this information personally... would that be of value to the success of your business? Of course it would!

While building a system like this could take experience, money and time to implement and test in a retail location - collecting all that information about the visitors to your website is easy and in many cases FREE!

One of the greatest abilities available to us on the web today to receiving feedback are web stats or analytics. Thanks to many free programs out there today, our clients are able to evaluate the effectiveness of their website whenever they want. Using a stat tracking program our clients are able to:

• Gage the effectiveness of their website to retain visitors and track their return visits.

• View which internet browsers visitors use to view their site.

• Determine the approximate geographic location of a certain visitor.

• Learn which links to external sites are clicked the most.

• Understand the peak times (hours, days or weeks) of traffic on a site - helpful for when to adjust content.

• Assess the ability for visitors to reach a featured page.

• And many more interesting stats about the behaviour and tendencies of your visitors...

With all this knowledge at your fingertips, it's funny to try to guess why people wouldn't take advantage of the many inexpensive or free ways to track visitors activities on your site. While many hosting servers offer some kind of stat tracking service, you need to determine if it fits the criteria for the info that you would like to collect.

The stat program that we tend to offer to our clients is statcounter.com but there are many other programs out there like google analytics, active meter and hitstats. Each program offers slightly different features or reporting styles, so it's important to look closely at what each program will partner into the way you collect info about your site's visitors.

If your using a stat tracking program for your website, now might be the time to take a look and make sure that you're getting all the info that you need to make a successful website.

About The Author

Chris Steingart is the president and lead web developer of QT Web Designs. Offering unique online solutions for your organization, Chris helps his clients maximize their online effectiveness by understanding visitor activity and traffic to websites.

Visit the author's web site at:
http://www.qtweb.ca