How to measure traffic to your website

How to Measure Traffic to your website Rocket Booster Media

After you set up your website, it will be there 24/7 showing information to potential customers, but you will not have any way to see how many visitors are visiting your site. This post will tell you how to measure traffic to your website.
There are three common methods to track visitors.

Counters

The first is methods go back to the time when websites were just starting to take off.  The original web pages used a hit counter that counted the number of times a site has been visited.   Often the indicator would be publicly displayed at the bottom of the page.  Although this is useful information it doesn’t tell you where the visitor came from or what pages they visited, or if they visited multiple times.

Web Server Stats

The second method uses the web server.  Web servers like Apache can keep detailed logs tracking your visitors.  Awstats and Webalizer will read the logs and present the information in a graphical form. There is a ton of information but it is lacking session information.  Again, you cannot track if a visitor visited multiple times or how much time they spent on your page.  WordPress JetPack analytics work in a similar method but tracks the information from within the WordPress framework.

Analytics

The third method uses cookies.  The best-known service that uses this method is Google Analytics. Analytics set a cookie (A small identifying piece of information).  Each time a page is loaded the Analytics service is contacted, and the cookie information is used to track the page visitor.  Analytics can track how much time the visitor spent on the page, what pages they visited if they have ever visited your page before, where they visitor was prior to visiting your site and can contain some geographical information like country, city.   You can view analytic in real-time and diagnose problems with your setup.  Analytics can show you what most customers do when they land on your website.
At Rocket Booster Media, we recommend using analytics because it provides much more information than the other methods.

Rocket Booster Media can help with all your marketing needs.   Our goal is to grow your business using innovative and the latest in online marketing. Contact the expert web designers at Rocket Booster Media today for a free website design proposal.

 

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