Your website is being visited by several thousand people a day/week/month/year depending on how popular you are. But how exactly do you know how many hits your site gets? What about how they got there? What are they doing once they get to your site?
Luckily for you inquisitive folks out there ….. and inquisitive you must be …… there are tools, for free, you can use to monitor your website traffic.
One of the most well known, most used and most written about is Google’s very own Google Analytics.
Here are the basics (I say basics because I can devote an entire website to the use of this free program).
Once you sign into the Analytics website, using a Google account (free), you will then state the name of your website and some minor details and then on completion you will be given a snippet of code.
With this new code you must put it into the original code of every page you want to be monitored. If you are using a content management system like this website does (I use WordPress) there are tools to use that will do all the work for you. Unfortunately, if you have a big website with many pages, then you must do it manually.
Once the code is inserted Google then crawls your site and recognises the correct location of the snippet…… then the fun begins.
Below is just a tiny sample of what can be done through the Google Analytics dashboard -
This is not the only analytical program on the internet. There are many alternatives out there, some of them are free and some ask for a fee for extra services they offer.