Gauging Success: Traffic Analysis

One of the most important aspects of website management is traffic analysis. If you don’t know where your visitors are coming from - and in what numbers - you can’t effectively promote your site, or gauge the effects of any current promotion efforts. A recent SitePoint article goes into more detail, discussing the merits of various tracking software.

“Early in the life of the web, counters were fairly popular. A counter is a simple script that records the number of visitors to a site in a text file or database and then displays the total, either textually or graphically, on the website. You still find them on some amateur pages, but for the most part, their use has died out - primarily because site owners wanted more complex information about their traffic, but also because these counters have come to be seen as unprofessional.

Now most professional or commercial sites use tracking software. Tracking software tells you more than just the number of visitors - it can break visitor statistics down by date, time, browser, page viewed, referrer, and countless other values. Trackers are so named because they can more or less detail for you the path a visitor takes through your website, so they do more than just count your traffic: they track it. You can choose from three main types of tracking software - let’s look at your options…

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