Monitoring Your Site Traffic

If you are not already monitoring your website traffic, then you really should be! But how can you do this and what do you need to know?

Knowing how many visitors are finding your site is excellent, but what when it drops or spikes? How can you reverse a drop? What can you do to repeat the spike? You need to know how people are finding your site and which pages they are arriving on.

The most simple form of this is just to look at your server logs. A simple log will tell you what search engine people arrived from, the search term and the page they visited. If you don't have huge mounds of traffic, then this is probably sufficient.

If you are a bit more technically involved, then you could right a piece of code to read through the logs and display counts of the above stats. Easy enough, when you know how.

For some of my own sites (those written in PHP) I have a small script that I can drop into the trailer of the page (all of my PHP sites have a trailer file, update the file for that site and every page on the site is updated). This little piece of code examines the referring page and if it's a search engine, then an email is sent to be telling me the page found, search engine and search term. Great for new sites, but more difficult when the sites are getting thousands of hits per day.

In that case you usually have to go to your web host and see what statistic packages they offer. Usually these will be all singing all dancing packages. My own host charges about £12 a site for these, so once the site is earning it can be a worth while investment.