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Monitor Your Blog’s Traffic

One your blog is up and running, you will probably want to know how many people are visiting it.

Your blogging software may provide some basic statistics right in the control panel. If you want more detailed statistics, you’ll need a third-party solution. If you run your own website, your hosting provider probably has some sort of statistics program, like Awstats installed. If you are on a hosted service such as Blogger or WordPress, don’t worry! Tracking code from programs such as StatCounter and Google Analytics is fairly easy to install on your blog.

What program should I use?

Both programs offer the same basic features, such as visitor time on your site, pages viewed, a list of sites that referred visitors to you, keywords visitors used in the search engine to find your site, and the most-often viewed pages on your site.

StatCounter displays your statistics information in real time, with up-to-the-minute data. The free version shows the last 500 page views to your site. After 500 page views, it overwrites earlier data. However, some data, such as the total monthly visits, are retained so you can track total visits over time. If you need to see more than the last 500 page views, you can upgrade to a paid version.

Google Analytics tracks a lot more than the last 500 page views, so you have far more historical information available. It’s also designed to integrate with AdWords, which is helpful for people using both programs. However, it only updates once a day, so you cannot view your data in real time. It also does not display the IP address of your visitors. IP addresses are individual numbers assigned by your Internet Service Provider that help identify visits to your site. IP addresses do not provide personal information such as names or addresses of visitors.

There are other free statistics programs available. Spend some time looking at the programs, Pay special attention to the interfaces. If you don’t understand how to navigate around the charts and graphs, the statistics won’t be any use to you. Google and StatCounter provide very different interfaces, so you can pick the one that works best for you.

Installing Tracking Code

In order for the statistics program to work on your site, you need to install some tracking code to your HTML. First you need to sign up with the company. You may need to go through a brief configuration process to determine how you want the program to work. At the end, you will be given a code snippet that you need to install in your blog’s HTML. You’ll then need to log in to your blog’s control panel and edit your templates to add the code snippet. If you aren’t sure how to do this, check your blogging provider’s help files.

Once the code snippet is added to your HTML, it will start tracking visits to your site. To see your statistics, you’ll log in to your tracking program’s control panel.

June 01, 2008 Statistics and Traffic

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