How to track visitors on your website - free
Your AdSense income comes entirely from people visiting your site and clicking on your ads so to maximize income you need to track what pages are getting the visits and which ones are pulling in the clicks. You then need to work the copy on those pages so that they pull in high paying AdSense ads.
Without tracking visitors on your website, you have no idea what pages are getting read.
If you run a newsletter too, you need to know which pages get the visits as a result of your emails and which don't.
Doing this requires a site statistics program or tracking script and whilst most people know that this is an essential tool, finding a good service that doesn't cost too much is not easy.
However, I've just started to use the StatCounter service and my initial impressions are that it is just wonderful. It gives you real time data about
-
page hits
-
visitor paths
-
entry pages
-
exit pages
-
how long people spend on your page
-
which site referred them in the first place
-
which keywords they used to find you
-
which browser they are using
-
what path each visitor takes round the site (this tells you what bits interest most people and can help you optimize your home page menu structure)
-
whether the visitor is a first time visitor or a returner
All this information is usually available from a tracking script but what makes StatCounter fun to use is that it has user-friendly interface. In particular I love seeing the country flag by every user's details.
For instance at the time of writing there are visitors on this site in no particular order from
| Thailand |  |
| United States |  |
| Sri Lanka |  |
| UK |  |
| Brazil |  |
| Germany |  |
| The Netherlands |  |
| Singapore |  |
| The Russian Federation |  |
| Canada |  |
I leave the best 'till last: StatCounter is free unless you get a lot of traffic and if you do, you can opt either to pay to upgrade or just remove the tracking script from unimportant pages.
To implement the service you need to add a small piece of JavaScript to your pages. Full instructions are given on the StatCounter site.
Oh, and there's one other really nice feature: when you want to find out more about a particular visitor, you get a photographic map of the world with a little red dot on it showing their location. Nice touch!
Here's a visitor from China!
Note: StatCounter doesn't track your AdSense clicks. To do this, you should use a tool like AdSense Tracker