If you have a website, and you are not tracking your visitors, this is for you. Having a website online can be a great source of income, advertisement, and communication between your customers and your business. The question is, how effective is your websites presence? Are you getting visitors? How many? Where are they coming from? So many questions come to mind.

There are quite a few solutions to get the answers to these questions.

1. Google Analytics

(the following is directly from Google)

Google Analytics is absolutely free and there are many benefits that come with installing it on your site. We've listed the top five things you can do as soon as you start tracking your site with Analytics:

1. AdWords advertisers can make Analytics available right in their AdWords account as a separate tab through a simple linking process. Advertisers can review extra data for their online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals), and pick out their highest performing ads.
   You can also use Analytics to track other Google products including AdSense, Blogger, and Google Sites.
   
   

2. See which pages drive the most pageviews on your site from the Top Content report. This report can answer questions you have about your most or least effective pages - for example, a high bounce rate indicates a landing page that should be redesigned or tailored to the specific ad which links to it.




3. Which groups of visitors became customers or did something else important to the success of your business? You can get key insights for these questions by setting up goals.

   
   

4. Grant other people in your company or organization access so that they are restricted to viewing reports in a profile or given full access to help manage your entire account as an administrator.




5. There are over 80 reports with customizable, drag-and-drop interfaces. You can also create your own reports with Custom Reporting, create the segments you want to see with Advanced Segmentation, or view multi-dimensional views of your data with Motion Charts.

Google Analytics is a favorite, and probably the most popular tracking system around, and as you can see it is a very powerful tool. You may find Google Analytics to be very bulky and com,plicated, however if you can learn to use this system effectively it will be very effective, in tracking your website interactions.

I personally like another system which is also free.

2. Statcounter

(the following was pulled from Statcounter.com)

StatCounter is packed full of useful and powerful tools to help you make better decisions about your website. A list of many of our features is below - just click on a feature for more detail (and check out the Live Demo for a hands-on look!).

Remember, unless otherwise stated, all these features are part of our free service!

• Log-Size
  
• Invisible Counter Option
  
• Configurable Counter
  
• Configurable Summary Stats
  
• Magnify User
  
• Drill Down
  
• Popular Pages
  
• Entry Pages
  
• Exit Pages
  
• Came From
  
• Keyword Analysis
  
• Recent Keyword Activity
  
• Search Engine Wars
  
• Visitor Paths
  
• Visit Length
  
• Returning Visits
  
• Recent Pageload Activity
  
• Recent Visitor Activity
  
• Country/State/City Stats
  
• Recent Visitor Google Map
  
• ISP Stats
  
• Browser Stats
  
• O.S. Stats
  
• Resolution Stats
  
• JavaScript Stats
  
• Email Reports
  
• Multiple Site Management
  
• User Access Management
  
• Public Stats
  
• Blocking Cookie
  
• HTTPS Tracking [Upgraded Members Only]
  
• Custom Branding Logo [Upgraded Members Only]
  

These are two of the best tracking systems around. All of these features will help you understand who is visiting your site, where they came from, how long were they on your site, what page were they on when they left, and so much more.

I highly suggest utilizing one of these options to help you answer these questions. Installing these systems is fairly simple, it only requires copying the code from the google or statcounter site, and pasting it to your websites html.

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