Website Traffic Checker – Know when you’re winning

You’d think if you get lots of traffic that you would be onto a winner, right? That people will come flooding to your site and pay for whatever it is that you are selling. Traffic analysis is a lot more complicated than that – who came to the site, how they got there, what they were interested in, how long they stayed, and whether they returned to the site, are all important statistic.

There is a lot of software out there that will tell you how much traffic you have or had going to your site, and some will give you the information that I mentioned above. The following is a small review of a few website traffic checker tools, and how well they work.

Alexa is a site that will give your web page a global ranking, this is utility is useful to quickly compare how the traffic on your site compares to that of your competition, and the overall top sites on the internet. The free version will tell you the sites’ global Alexa ranking. You can pay do a full Alexa Site Audit, or you can upgrade the account, which will add features such as a premium listing, certify your site and gather detailed statistics, and perform bi-weekly site audits for you.

Traffic Travis is a piece of software that will do a lot of things, including giving you an idea of the number of visitors that you may get to your site per month for a given keyword. It can also tell you the rankings of your pages in the search engines, as well as monitoring the page rank of the pages on your website. Traffic Travis allows you to do keyword research for a site, and will also do a simple audit of your web pages to ensure that the on-page SEO is correct, and that there are no errors. This is a very good piece of software – I use it all the time, it’s not really analytics based, but I had to mention it, due to its tight connection with website traffic. This is a big piece of software, and will be reviewed separately.

Market Samurai is another software product similar to Traffic Travis, actually it has been around longer than Traffic Travis. This is a very reliable piece of software to help you do keyword research, find SEO competition for those keywords, and do other things like find content for keywords, and locate links. Again, this is not an analytics software tool, but does allow you to check your rankings by page rank and also by keyword, and therefore does fall into the category of Website Traffic Checker. This software will have its own separate review.

Google Analytics is a well-known free tool that will give you pretty much all the statistics that I mentioned. It is pretty accurate, and be linked to Google webmaster tools so that you are able to see some search engine optimization statistics, such as landing pages, search engine queries and geographical summary. The interesting parts of Google Analytics are obviously the number of visitors, the number of returning visitors, the bounce rate, search engine queries, and to some extent geographic summary. Given all this information it is entirely possible to fine tune your site to improve things like bounce rate, to do more search engine optimization to increase rankings, and hence visitors, and perhaps to provide different languages to better cater to the geographic audience that you have. The one downside to Google Analytics is the fact that the data can be delayed by two days or so, which makes it harder to correlate cause and effect.

One such tool that is real time, and offers the same sort of power as Google Analytics is a tool called Clicky Web Analytics. This is very similar to Google Analytics, but is real time – clicks does have some extra cool features in the paid version, such as spy, which allows you to see the real time details of the users on your site, such as IP address, country, operating system, browser, page they are viewing and where they came from. The paid version also comes with something called big screen, which is, you guess it, a big screen full of analytic data, such as visitors, actions, searches, referrers, goals and campaign. It is a summary screen, but is quite a nice little addition to allow you to get to the data that you want in the shortest possible time. There is functionality to be able to track tweets from twitter, and a summary of users who reply, the links, senders and receivers, hash tags used and statistics on how positively or negatively your message is being heard by your audience. You can also access the tweets directly. Very cool little addition to see how much of your web traffic is due to twitter. This really is a great tool, and is improving all the time – new features are constantly being added – highly recommended Website Traffic Checker.

Included with some hosting packages is a statistics application, called ‘AW Stat’, usually this is free. This application will record all the visits to your site; its biggest benefit is also its biggest drawback. It shows you all the visits, including computer programs (bots) such as search engine spiders that search your site. This information is very interesting to see, but is not in any way relevant to what you want a Website Traffic Checker for. The data is very detailed, which is good, but you need to spend a good deal of time getting used to where the data is, so that you can find out what you need to quickly. You would also have to log in to your hosting control panel to do this check, which makes it a little slower than other Website Traffic Checker tools out there.

There is also Stat Counter which is another free Website Traffic Checker; this particular tool is limited by the number of allowable page loads, and the size of the logs. If you have more than 250,000 page loads per month, then you will need to pay for this service. This is another very comprehensive analytics tool, which has the usual statistics that you would expect, plus some additional ones such as exit pages, exit links, details of the systems accessing the site, such as screen resolutions, operating systems, and whether JavaScript was available.

Overall the best combination I can think of would be Clicky paid and Market Samurai, although Traffic Travis is also good (and you can get a free version first). This will cover that you pick the keywords with the best return on investment, and traffic potential, and that you can see the results of your efforts once you start SEO.