Website Traffic Report Tips - How to Use a Website Traffic Counter For Getting More Visitors?

Tracking the traffic that comes to your website or blog is important, and so is analyzing each website traffic report that results. After all, how else can you tell whether what you're doing is working? Fortunately, it is also very easy to do. Read on to find out how to use a free website traffic counter to keep track of your visitors -- and get many more.

Target Your Audience More Precisely

If you use your traffic counter software correctly, it can provide you with plenty of information to help you target your audience more accurately and respond to their needs. Even the simplest traffic trackers will provide a wealth of information about what time of day your site gets the most visitors and where they come from.

Setting Up Your Traffic Counter

Here's what is involved in setting up a traffic tracking program. You fill out a form with information such as your email address, and your URL, and you'll be given a snippet of HTML to insert into your website's source code.

You may or may not want to place a "badge" about your particular website traffic counter on your site. Some people wait until they've had a certain number of hits - say, 1,000 - before putting up a hit counter on their site.

Most web traffic counters give you the option of receiving a weekly email with a website traffic report for the week, including which sites the traffic came from, if any, which visitors went directly to your site (probably from a bookmark), and which search terms they used to get to your site.

What to Do With the Traffic Report Information?

This information is very valuable because you can see trends, such as clusters of visitors in a certain region (which could help you more effectively target your advertising), search terms that may need to be reconciled with the keywords you use, and times of day or days of the week when traffic is more concentrated.

You'll also get information about which pages are the most popular, and which page the visitor was on when he or she left the site. Page views will be counted, as well as hits. One hit can be made up of many page views, and both sets of numbers are very informative.

Free traffic counters almost always have "pro" upgrades that will offer you more in the way of statistical analysis and reporting including world maps with visitor locations, customizable time periods for analysis, and more detailed information about visitors.

You May Already Have an Excellent Free Traffic Counter

Meanwhile, if you have a hosting account with a Cpanel, you already have a terrific traffic counter built right in. It's turned on automatically and all you have to do is visit periodically to check your stats. It's listed under AWSTATS and provides all the information given above as well as pretty graphics.

While traffic counters are so-called "lagging indicators" since they represent what has happened rather than predicting what will happen, they provide much valuable information about what your site's strong and weak points are.

How to Improve Your Numbers

So don't just use them to find out what's been happening but take action on what you learn from your website traffic report. If you don't get as many visitors as you'd like, why not publish some articles and take some other traffic increasing action -- and check back a day or two later to see if there's movement.

And if you have a blog, all it might take is for you to post more, and let people know on Twitter and other places that you've done so, and you'll probably see your readers increase.

Getting a regular website traffic report is crucial when it comes to promoting your business, whether it's local, national or even international. Get a FREE special report on how to increase your revenue and your customer base, and, on request, a free 30 minute consultation with me, Elisabeth Kuhn, on Local Business Marketing Strategies.

And here's how you can learn to do all of this yourself: In my comprehensive blogging course. Check out http://www.TheBloggingCourse.com/go for when the next session starts, and get a FREE Keyword Research Tutorial as my gift to you (Look for the information on how to get it approximately 2/3 down the page).