How do you know what your Internet visitors are looking at when they hit your site?

Having a better understanding of traffic on your site assists in planning future development, increasing web site traffic and also provides opportunities for increasing revenue through targeted advertising.

Do you know how long web site visitors are there for, how they hit your site or what country they are from? You might be receiving hundreds or thousands of hits a day, but if the visitors were only on your site for 15 seconds each, that would indicate there's a problem.

If you wish to sell Internet advertising space to clients, they will want to know about your visitor demographics - guessing won't cut it and you'll lose potential advertising business very quickly. A basic free web site hit counter stats just won't cut it.

How does it work?

You put your code into your WebPages and every time someone visits a WebPages and the code send valuable information about the visitor back to your log. Stat organises all this information into charts & lists to make your analysis easier.

• Visited Pages
• Referrals
• Browsers
• Operating Systems
• Countries
• Search Terms
• Search Engines
• Robots

All reports are accompanied by easy to analyze graphs.

Studying web traffic - methods and statistics

Gathering information on web site traffic is a crucial element in the planning of marketing and further development. When studying your web site traffic, it is also important to be able to understand the associated statistics.

A question that webmasters are often asked is "how many hits does your site get? You then need to ask, "Do you mean hits, requests, unique visitors or page views? 

What is a hit or request?

A hit is the result of a file being requested and served from your web site. This can be a html document, an image file, an audio track etc. Web pages that contain a large number of elements will return high hit scores.

Hits are of very little consequence when analyzing your visitor demographics.

What is a page view?

A page view means just that.

Once again, it is not a true indication of how many different people are visiting your web site, but it is a good way to judge how "sticky" (the ability to retain the interest of visitors) your web site is and is an important consideration regarding the possibility of attracting high paying advertising.

What is a unique visitor?

A unique visitor (combined with page view data) is where stats really count. It is someone with a unique IP address who is entering a Web site for the first time that day (or some other specified period). When you log onto the Internet, you are assigned a unique IP address, or if you are a cable modem user your IP address is usually "static", meaning that it never changes.

Your IP address is an identifier and while you are using it, no one else on the Internet can utilize that particular set of numbers. Your number is counted once, usually for a 2-24 hour period, dependent upon the tracking software.

What is a referrer?

A referrer is simply the origins of the visitor to your site, i.e. the last site visited and the page on that web site.

The report ranks referring URLs (external web pages) that brought traffic to your site. For Sessions without an external referral, which occurs when a Visitor goes directly to your site via a bookmark/favorite or by typing in the URL directly, the (no referral) entry is incremented. This allows you to compare the percentage of traffic from external links versus Visitors that already know about your site.

What is a Search Terms?

Search Terms report lists the actual keywords/phrases people typed into search engines to find your site. Entries are ranked by the number of Sessions each was responsible for. To list all phrases with a particular word, enter the word in the Filter at the top and press Enter. The Total at the bottom of the report will now represent the total number of search phrases that contain that word.

What is a Search Engines report?

Search Engines report lists each Search Engine that referred traffic to your site using a keyword search. By clicking on the arrow next to each entry, you can see the actual Search Terms people typed in. Entries are ranked by the number of Sessions each Search Engine was responsible for.

What is a Robot?

Robots report lists the Robots and Spiders that visited your site, ranked by Hits (requests). This report does not include Browsers, such as Internet Explorer. By clicking the arrow next to any entry, you can see its specific version information.

Here we will discuss some of the free and paid web site stat to monitor your web site traffic.

STATCOUNTER

http://www.statcounter.com/

It’s a free and reliable invisible web tracker that is also highly configurable. It provides with real-time detailed web stats. Insert a simple piece of our code on your web page and you will be able to analyse and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time!

· Free, Fast, Responsive, Quick loading and Reliable Service.
· Invisible Tracking - no ads on your website.
· Accurate real-time website statistics with detailed visitor tracking and analysis.

ONESTAT

http://www.onestat.com/

Advanced and powerful web analytics to track in-depth visitor behavior, commerce, leads and conversions. Excellent web metric solutions for medium to large websites. The essential tool for web marketers and web masters!

· Report Builder, Access Management and E-mail Manager
· Massively scalable and easy to use
· In-depth visitor navigation reports
· Provides segmentation and website traffic analysis trend reports

ActiveMeter Hit Counter

http://www.activemeter.com/

This site is a web site visitor tracker. Web site counter code provides traffic data and statistics. ActiveMeter is that and much more! Because the real value lies in tracking visitors, not just visits, our unique web site analyzer is designed around web visitors.

· Fast, accurate and reliable service make tracking web site traffic easy to do
· Easy setup and no server requirement means you're up and running in minutes rather than days
· Visible and Invisible web counters keep your web site looking the way you want

CQ Counter

http://www.cqcounter.com/

This statistics reports can enable you to identify areas for web site improvement that can directly impact the performance of your site(s) and increase competitive advantage.

· Which sites or search engines send to your site more visitors?
· How many hits have your sites every hour, day, week, month, and year?
· What operating system and web browsers do your visitors use?

Add free stat

http://www.addfreestats.com

Now you can keep track of how many people visit your website, when they come, how they found your website and much, much more... All website statistics reports are in real-time!

Free! Increase your website traffic!
By including your website in our popular website directory, we will help you to increase your website traffic. Websites are ranked by traffic, rate or votes. It's absolutely free!

WebSTAT

http://www.webstat.com

This stat makes Web analytics easy and cost-effective. Our hosted analytics software tracks and stores web statistics for businesses and non-profit organizations of all sizes. You don't need thousands of dollars to get a good web traffic analysis package.

· Easy to install client-side statistics software
· Access to over 40 reports, including executive summaries, traffic patterns, visited pages, search engines, campaign tracking, and visitor details
· Scalable architecture. Track 1 page view or 1 million page views per day

Google Analtics - Urchin

http://www.google.com/analytics (Formerly Urchin)

The stat shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance the visitor experience. Improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web.