Stat-Counters: The Importance Of Tracking Your Visitors
When trying to optimize your website, you will need to gather
all the information about the few visitors that you now have.
This will help you make improvements to your site and increase
your traffic. One of the best ways to gather this statistical
data is through the use of a counter.
Some of you may not know that dropping a counter onto each page
of your website will not only show you the number of hits to
that page, but also logs tidbits of important information too.
The following is a list of some of the data that is collected
from a stat-counter.
Screen Resolution:
Knowing the screen resolution tells you how the majority of
visitors view your web pages. For example: If your design is
based around 800 x 600 screen resolution, and the majority of
you visitors use a 1024 x 768 resolution, you may want to
redesign your layout.
Keyword:
If a visitor was directed to your site by a search engine, then
knowing the search term used will help in optimizing your page
around important keywords relevant to you sites topic.
Length Of Visit:
This is important that if everyone is showing up to your site,
but doesn't seem to stay, then check for slow loading of you
page or some other reason that might turn away visitors.
Enter-Page/ Exit-Page
If your visitors are leaving from the same page they first come
to, then you will need to figure out why they are not visiting
other pages. Maybe the links to the other pages are hidden by
are too small or non-descriptive.
Returning Visitors:
This will help you determine which pages your visitors find
important. You can then concentrate more effort on those topics.
There are many more tidbits of statistical data a stat-counter
can provide, and best of all you can get them for free. Theses
services are provided for the benefit of building back links,
and in hopes to sell you upgrades.
If you think that a counter looks tacky, you have the option to
make it invisible. This will still enable you to collect
important statistical data without your visitors seeing the
counter itself.
So if your serious about getting more traffic, you must first
learn all you can from the traffic you already have, and a free
stat-counter is one of the best places to start.