How to Monitor Web Site Traffic

Web site traffic is easy to monitor and track.

Website traffic is the life blood of any website. Accurately tracking the sources of your website traffic is vitally important for understanding how to allocate your advertising dollars and your search engine optimization efforts. There are many technologies that track website traffic. Websites hosted on cPanel equipped hosting platforms come with a number of built in web stats programs. If you want greater depth and breadth of web site traffic analysis you may need to install other website traffic monitoring programs.

Instructions

AWStats

1. Log into your cPanel account. Scroll down to the Logs section and click the AWStats link.

2. Select the domain hosted on your account to view the stats of your website.

3. Review the traffic stats for your website. You will be presented with a comprehensive report detailing unique visitors by time and date and pages visited.

Google Analytics

1. Visit the Google Analytics page and click the "Sigh Up Now" link. You must have a Google account to access Analytics. You can get a Google Account for free (See Resources).

2. Log into Google Analytics with your Google Account ID. Click the "Sign Up" button to create your Google Analytics account.

3. Enter your website URL, account name, country and time zone. Click the "Continue" button. Enter your first and last name and your country then click the "Continue" button. You will be taken to a Terms of Service page. Check the "I Agree" check box and click the "Create New Account" button. You will be taken to a tracking code setup page.

4. Copy the code provided to your clipboard and paste it into each web page you wish to track immediately. Place the code before the </head> tag on each page. Upload your pages to your server using the interface provided by your web host.

5. Click the "Save and Finish" button. You will be taken to your Google Analytics account page. You can monitor your website traffic and run reports that break down your traffic by source, keywords and page views.

References

• AWStats official web site
• Google Analytics

Resources

• AW Stats Sample Page
• Google Accounts