After building, testing and promoting your new website, you now have to face another issue: tracking your website traffics. Have you wondered how many visitors your website has and where they are from? To answer these questions, you need to actively monitor your website traffics. There are many advantages to do website analytics. By collecting your site traffic data, you will gain more information about your site’s audience. The more you know your audience, the better you will serve them better in the future.
Usually your web server should have features for basic web analytics. If they are not available to you for some reason, you can use some third party service to get the job done. For example, I found Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics/) is a free and nice tool for analyzing websites. To use Google Analytics, you have to create a free account on their site. After logging into your account, you can add your site, generate a tracking code, and add the tracking code to your website. After the code has been successfully installed, your website traffic data will be collected and shown as a report in your Google Analytics account. With this service, you can easily know how many people have visited your site, where they are located, how they came to your site and what kind of web browser they used to access your website.
If for some reason that you don’t want to use the Google Analytics service, you may try the following services instead:
Piwik
http://piwik.org/
Clicky
www.clicky.com/
MyBlogLog
www.mybloglog.com/
You may need to pay to access their full services but their basic features are free to use.
There are more and more web analytics sites offering free services. If you need free tools to keep tracking your site, you should try several of them and find the best one to fit your needs.
Usually your web server should have features for basic web analytics. If they are not available to you for some reason, you can use some third party service to get the job done. For example, I found Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics/) is a free and nice tool for analyzing websites. To use Google Analytics, you have to create a free account on their site. After logging into your account, you can add your site, generate a tracking code, and add the tracking code to your website. After the code has been successfully installed, your website traffic data will be collected and shown as a report in your Google Analytics account. With this service, you can easily know how many people have visited your site, where they are located, how they came to your site and what kind of web browser they used to access your website.
If for some reason that you don’t want to use the Google Analytics service, you may try the following services instead:
Piwik
http://piwik.org/
Clicky
www.clicky.com/
MyBlogLog
www.mybloglog.com/
You may need to pay to access their full services but their basic features are free to use.
There are more and more web analytics sites offering free services. If you need free tools to keep tracking your site, you should try several of them and find the best one to fit your needs.
