Track Your Visitors

Darren from Problogger.net today asked the question “which statistic is most crucial to your blogging” and it got me to thinking about visitor statistics in the broader sense. While I don’t think that any one statistical measurement in the absence of all others is terribly useful, understanding how visitors come to your site, what they do and how long they do it when on your site, and how visitors ultimately leave your site could be the most important information that you collect about your site.

If you are running a pro blog but are not keeping detailed statistics on how your visitors interact with your site, you are doing yourself a terrible disservice. I strongly recommend that you get yourself a decent stats package and there are dozens of them that fit the bill. A couple of good stats packages are Sitemeter and StatCounter. They both after free accounts with basic services that you can always upgrade if you need to get more information. Google Analytics is a much more powerful free stats package but there is a waiting list and the stats are not real time. Personally, I use the free version of Sitemeter which gives me real time stats with my last 100 users and Google Analytics for when I need to perform detailed analysis of my visitor traffic.

Technorati Tags: Stats, Sitemeter, StatCounter, Google Analytics, Visitor tracking