When you've set up a website and launched into the world, the first thing you'll want to know is who has been visiting your site and how they liked it. So how do you check your website's visitor statistics, how many visitors, where they came from, what they did on the site, etc.?
Well, you should use some form of visitor tracking, which is a code that you add to your site that does all that for you. The code will be linked to a tracking facility and record statistics about your visitors and where they are going on your site.
Probably the best known and most used is Google Analytics. It's free and available on Google.com, all you have to do is sign up for an account.
When you enter your information, Google Analytics will generate a specific code for your site, which you can paste on the page you want to track or on the template of your main website. It is very easy to do it in HTML if you are using a blog or a content-managed system, or your webmaster will take only a couple of minutes to do it for you.
Then, once the system has been running for a few days, you will get an incredible amount of useful information about the performance of your site. Some of this information is very detailed and will be more useful as you have more experience with the site and its marketing campaigns, but for now, you will probably find that the panel that shows an overview of your site’s performance is enough to get you started. . .
The panel appears when you sign in to your site visitor management check-in app. It shows the key results you can use to evaluate the performance of your site and each element on the board can be expanded to show more and more details within that element.
The first element is a graph that shows the number of visitors each day, usually what most people initially want to see. For more details, you can choose alternative statistics such as what percentage were new visitors, how long they were on the site, how many pages they saw and how many were left without seeing a second page (the bounce rate).
This is the information that will tell you how many people are visiting your site and how interesting they are finding it when they get there.
In the content summary window, you can find these statistics for each of the individual pages of your site. Here, there are even more details available, for example, which page visitors entered or left, or what keywords they used to find that page.
When you look at all this information, it may be too much at first, but, as you experiment with it, you will see that it contains the comments you need to make changes to your site and content, so that visitors stay longer. and see more pages.
Also on the dashboard you will find a map that shows the numbers of visitors by specific countries. This map gives you access to your detailed visitor statistics country by country, so you can target your content more specifically.
The last element on the board is the traffic sources report, which shows the percentage of traffic that arrives at your site directly, through reference sites and search engines.
If you write articles regularly or get links from videos or other sites (all very effective and free ways to increase your traffic), this report will be of great interest. In addition to showing the percentage / total number of visits through reference sites, it will also show, in more detail, each site that sends you traffic and the number of visitors that come from each. This information is essential to get a really good picture of how article submission sites or individual reference links work.
As you will see, Google Analytics is an indispensable free tool that will be increasingly useful as you develop your site and start using paid methods to attract traffic. When you are in that stage, you can start setting goals and use the most advanced reports available to confirm that you are getting positive results for your expenses and really making a profit. But more about that in another article.