How do you track your visitors?

Knowing who is visiting your site, and knowing how they got there, is important to building a following. If you know that most of your visitors are coming from google and most of those users are searching for recipes, for example, it may be in your best interest to write more recipe entries. Of course is you have a hamster and gerbil site, you may want to contact the authorities. ;-)




I use two different services and have not quite decided which I prefer. Both services are completely free and both provide referrers, keywords and more. Both sites also require you to embed a small piece of code in your site. The second option below is easier to use if you don't have the option, or the skills, to change your template.




The first is google analytics. It's an easy sign up to get an account. After you embed a small bit of html (in the body section of your template), you can visit the analytics site and get reports about visitors and keywords. It's very easy to use. Google Analytics is completely invisible and your statistics are as private as a google account can be.




You can get a nice tutorial and overview from google.




The second choice, that I have used anyway, is StatCounter. This is my favorite right now. It is super easy to get an account and super easy to add the required code. While Google Analytics requires a change to you template, StatCounter can go anywhere you can put javascript. There is also a pure HTML version but it cannot track as many statistics as the javascript version can.




You can get the same stats as Google but I just find navigation to be a bit more intuitive. I also like the fact that with StatCounter, you can download the raw logs and manipulate them as you like. StatCounter will store details for the last 500 hits and aggregates the rest. You can sign up for a premium service that will keep details longer. Or, you can just make sure to download the raw logs before you hit the 500 limit.




StatCounter can gather statistics invisibly or you can add a counter. I have a counter at the bottom of my blog (I just installed it on this blog actually). You can also choose to have a StatCounter button to help support the statcounter service.




You can read the complete list of StatCounter features. I didn't see a tutorial but the site is really easy to navigate.




The summary here is that if you want to build a following for your blog, you should be familiar with your visitors, where they come from and what they are looking for. If your content sucks, there's not much you can do. But if you plan to write good content, you add some kind of tracking code. Google Analytics and StatCounter are both free so check them out.

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