I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “if you build it, they will come”. It’s one matter, to get prospective customers to visit your website, it’s another matter to “convert” them to real paying customers. Tracking what your visitors do once they get to your website might sound impossible, but it’s not!

Tracking your website traffic is so critical to a website’s success that I strongly recommend it to all of my website clients. If you don’t know what your visitors are doing once they come to your website, you have no idea what changes to make to your website’s content and structure might help convert them into customers.

There are many great tools available to do this, I recommend Web-Stat to my clients because it’s very affordable and makes tracking your website visitors easy and fun. Go here to learn more about Web-Stat. It usually takes less than an hour for me to install Web-Stat on a client’s website. If you’re using a pay-per-click campaign, tracking your traffic is the only way to gauge your return on investment.

While it’s currently impossible to see exactly who is visiting your website, it is possible to tell many, many different things about where they came from and what they did once they arrived on your website. You can tell which city and country they were in. You can tell which page they entered your website on and where they went next. You can even tell how long your website visitors stayed on each page they visited!

By having access to visitor traffic information, you can make changes to your website to drive people to certain pages. For example, I like trying to get people to contact me, so I try to drive my website traffic to my contact page. Web-Stat makes it easy for me to see how many people reach my contact page, and therefore I can make changes to my website to try and get more traffic to that targeted page…and then see the results of the changes via Web-Stat. I’m not simply guessing and wondering if my changes worked. I can get real data about what people are doing and how my changes impacted their behavior on my website.

Tracking your website traffic is not only critical to your website’s success, it can also be entertaining. Ok, maybe not entertaining for everyone, but if you’re read my resume or bio, you know that my background is in engineering, and therefore I love data. I literally check my website traffic many times each day, because I find it fascinating to see what people are doing on my website. Ok, maybe it’s my clinical psychology degree that makes me so interested in their behavior, but either way, I really do find it entertaining and informative.

So do yourself and your website a favor and install website traffic tracking tool like Web-Stat on your website and become instantly more informed about what your website visitors are doing on your website.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 11:33 am and is filed under the Getting Traffic category. Read other Aldebaran Website Design Blog articles by returning to main blog page. Need a blog added to your website? Click here to read about blog installation services or click here to contact Aldebaran Web Design.