Traffic is without a dub the most important thing for all websites. The traffic is the one who decides if the website is successful or not, traffic is the one who helps you sell your products and earn more from PPC and affiliate. Long story on short, if you want to have a successful website and probably create a small or big online business you need traffic. We will talk about how to get traffic in future posts. Please subscribe to our RSS Feeds to get updates about our future articles. Today I will present you some of the best ways to monitorize the traffic for your website or blog.
People over the world consider Google Analytics to be the best tool for analyzing website traffic. It seems like the name Google has a huge role in this story.
Analytics comes with very detailed statistics about your websites and also with a great user interface. The stats are updated on a daily basis, so you will be able to track the number of visitors from the previous day easily. The stats are organized in more categories.
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Country
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Traffic Sources (Search engine visitors, reffering sites and direct traffic)
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The browser
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The operating system
and many more, but these are the most important features.
This is how the Google Analytics – Website Stats looks like
Like I said earlier, Google Analytics allows you to add unlimited websites and see stats everyday.
Installation
To install the Analytics web stats in your website you just have to add a simple code into the <body> section of your site. That’s all! After including the Analytics code, you will be able to see in the Analytics account that the server gets data from your site.
This is how the Tracking Code page should look like. You might see that the Tracking status is – receiving data, that means Google Analytics has stat gathering traffic information from your website.
2. Firestats
This is more like a self hosted tracking system script. You will be able to see statistics for your website right from your website. Firestats is compatible with many PHP platforms and even standalone PHP scripts. If you have a Wordpress blog, which I believe you do, you will be able to install it in minutes.
This is the demo page for Firestats.cc website. You can see it live. Click here!
As you might see, in the screenshoot bellow are statistics about the Firestats.cc website. The stats are live and you can refresh them by clicking the Refresh button or wait 5 minutes (you can change the waiting time).
The stats are organized in
- Recent Refferers
- Search terms on every possible search engine
- Recent Popular Pages
- Browsers
- Operating Systems
- Countries
They are concentrated in a Hits table.
As you might see, Firestats can extract data from your sites in minutes, so you will be able to receive data very quick and precise.
Installation
Because most people are using Wordpress blogs, I will explain you the installation for it. For other website platforms please check the Installation and upgrade page from Firestats.cc
There are two types of installation process for Firestats – Firestats Hosted on web blog host or Firestats satellite (for advanced users – firestats is located on a different server).
Self Hosted Firestats Installation
The installation process is same as every Wordpress plugin installation. All you have to do is to extract the archive you have download from Firestats into wp-content/plugins/firestats/ and just activate the plugin from Plugin page in admin area. After that, Firestats will be accessible from the Admin Dashboard.
Hosted on another server Installation
- Install FireStats somewhere on your web server following the Standalone installation instructions.
- Copy only the file firestats-wordpress.php to the Wordpress plugins directory (it you should end up at wp-content/plugins/)
- Open the Wordpress plugins tab, and activate FireStats.
- Go to Options->FireStats
- Enter the path where you installed FireStats
- Enter the URL FireStats can be accessed from.
- Access FireStats from the Dashboard
This is it! You are done.
There are many other ways to monitorize your website traffic, but I decided to share with you only the best ones. Although, if you feel that either of these ones is not for you, than I have some other suggestions for you.
These are just websites similar to Google Analytics.
3. StatCounter
In my opinion, StatCounter is the second best traffic analyzer system after Google Analytics. StatCounter is 100% free and you have access to all existing features. Learn more about StatCounter by reading their About page.
4. Mon.Itor.Us
This is a powerful tool for measuring the website traffic and is pretty similar to Google Analytics and StatCounter.
5. Sitemeter
One of the most popular web traffic monitorizing tools.
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2 Responses to Best Ways To Monitorize Website Traffic
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October 18th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
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Jeff Hall
December 18th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
A friend encoraged me to read this page, brill post, fascinating read… keep up the cool work!