How many users visit your site each day? Where do they come from? Where do they go when they leave? What keywords did they search on to find you? What country are they in?

The answers to these, and so many more questions are easily, and often freely, available with the help of a good stats system.

The lifeblood of your online business is traffic. Not the noisy, fuel guzzling, car and truck kind, but the constant flow of fresh, unique visitors who are eager to consume your infomation and hopefully buy your products. Just getting visitors to your site is not enough – you need targetted traffic. For example, if you market a product for UK small business owners, but 80% of your traffic comes from Asia or South America you’re not being very efficient with your marketing.

My clients are often amazed by the wealth of data that can be harvested about visitors to their sites. Everything from physical locality to screen resolution, what browser operating system they are using and how many pages they viewed before heading to another site. This is all valuable information. If you know that 75% of your visitors spend less than 5 seconds on your homepage, and then leave, you are either attracting many people to your site how aren’t interested in what you offer, or more likely you need to spend some time making your homepage more attractive to those visitors – better communicating what your site offers.

There are loads of stats systems out there, some better than others. Almost certainly you’ll have basic stats included with your hosting package and these can be very useful on their own. Personally I use a combination of 2 free services which, when combined, give me a wealth of invaluable information

StatCounter.com offer a monthly subscription based service, but offer a restricted version for free which is stil excellent. It takes 2 minutes to set up a free account, generate the HTML snippet and add it to your site. The wizard to generate the code supports a multitude of popular blogging and CMS platforms as well as basic HTML and is very simple to use. You can also block your own usage from affecting the stats (assuming you’re logged in to a blog or CMS system)

An example of visualised stats from StatCounter

Once set up, the system starts to track data from your visitors which you can then view at the StatCounter site by logging in to your account. The stats are viewed per project so you can set up stats for a number of sites as different projects and view them all from the same account. The free service allows a log of up to 500 entries per project and you can buy blocks of 1000 extra and allocate them between projects as you choose. Having said that, the information just from the free allocation is still great. The system stores lifetime data on page loads and unique visitors etc. And the data limits are only for detailed information such as recent keyword activity.

The second tool I use is Google Analytics

Google analytics is another free service, this time from the search giants Google. Google analytics, or GA for short, tracks visitors in a similar way to StatCounter but can also be used to track conversions – i.e. which visitors from what type of traffic results in a sale or opt-in. Essentially it provides information for Adwords customers (Google’s highly successful pay-per-click system) but it still provides some very useful information which StatCounter doesn’t provide. Firstly you can sort visitors from paid entries (via PPC) and non-paid or natural traffic. Analytics also allows you to export date to XML files or ‘print friendly’ views which are features sdaly lacking from StatCounter.

The general focus of GA is on commerce and a big part of their interface is geared towards tracking ‘goals’ or conversions. A goal could be a sale, an opt-in, a file download etc. You can also track how far along your marketing ‘funnel’ a visitor gets before leaving if they don’t convert which is a very useful way of finding weak points in your marketing system. The other big advantage is that for customers with an Adwords account, GA will track unlimited pageview stats for free!

Best of both worlds…

So which to use? Well I opt for both – there is a certain amount of overlap but since both systems are free (unless you upgrade to a paid StatCounter account) and both have features which the other lacks, a 2 pronged approach will give you the most amount of information. In marketing, knowledge really is power, and with these 2 systems in place you’ll have the power to build on your past and current successes and develop your business to the next level.