Sunday, 7 August 2011

How to Keep Track of Where Your Website Traffic is Coming From - Tracking Your Traffic

By Wayne Sharer


I want to start with a very important question for you. Are you ready? It's actually a two-part question. So it's kind of a trick way to ask two questions. Are you tracking your traffic, and do you know where your website traffic is coming from? If you aren't, then you are dramatically slowing your progress and limiting your profits for your business.

You already know how important it is to get highly targeted traffic to your website. You must be able to do this to have any chance at all of converting your web visitors into buyers. In teaching you to do this, virtually every marketer tells you to use the free tool called Google Analytics. It's drilled into your head how important tracking your traffic can be.

Like I said, Google Analytics is a free tool. It was created by Google for their advertisers to keep track of results on the various Google Advertising networks. The amazing thing is the Analytics code can be used to track any website page, whether advertising in Google or not. The principle limitation is for the code to be truly a complete evaluator, it has to be on every page in your website.

This is important to understand. You can have the Analytics code on every one of your webpages and still not be getting completely accurate data. You see, Google isn't getting the information from your server - where real ground truth rests. It's relying on code snippets and pixels to figure out what's happening. This method is pretty good, but it's far from complete. The good news is the trends the data shows is accurate. Just the numbers may not be so accurate.

But wait, there is a backup for you and it's free. If you are a smart marketer, with your website hosted at provider giving you a cPanel interface, then it's right at your fingertips. It's the most accurate data there is because your server is giving it to you. There's no special codes, and not little pixels. Every page is automatically tracked.

There's two free programs your web host can provide. They are Webalizer and AWStats. There are some hosts that provide both, and many that provide one or the other. The programs are already installed in your cPanel, and they provide the best web traffic statistics you can get. It's already there waiting for you.

Just log in to your website cPanel and go to the logs section of the menu.in this section you will find an icon for one or the other of the two programs. Simply click on the icon and start looking around and get familiar with the data presented. To get this data, you have to do nothing. No code to install and no tracking pixels to correctly place on your pages. It's there automatically.

That's it, that's all there is to knowing the real truth of your website. You now have another free method of tracking your traffic, and it's hiding right at your fingertips. No more guessing as to where your website traffic is coming from. You didn't have to install a thing.




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