by Alit Trisatya

Created on: January 23, 2009   Last Updated: October 05, 2009

There are an old saying that you can't manage what you can't
measured. So managing your website by monitoring & analyzing the traffic coming through your site is very important for your website success. By monitoring your website, you will be able to view your website's performance and finding the best way to improve it.

Basically, Internet traffic is the data flow in the Internet or your Local Area Network. One of the examples of internet traffic is web traffic, which is the size of the data that related to the World Wide Web. A

ping' test is the test used to measure the internet traffic.

So, how exactly the Internet traffic was monitored?

Traffic Monitoring Software

The first way to monitor the internet traffic is by using traffic monitoring software. There are many free software out there that enabling you to monitor your Internet traffic. Basically, all of this program examines the usage of your local area network and making a download and upload statistic. The purpose is to monitor and logged the IP traffic between Internet and LAN.

Traffic monitoring software will provide you with a real-life data of traffic accounting and monitoring. If there's a new connection, it will be registered and monitored. This data will be useful to count upload and download traffic of a computer, and it can also be extended to create a traffic accounting system.

When started, the traffic monitoring software will collect latest information about computer's network interface and starts to monitoring the upload and download usage of each network interface. Traffic monitoring software also has the capability to inform the status of your websites by sending in an email notification. It can also running a special program if your website goes down

Google Analytics

The second way to monitor the Internet traffic is by using traffic monitoring website such as Google Analytics. This is the best free website statistic programs out there. It will provide you with various statistical data such as visitor counter, page views, entry and exit pages, referral source, and many more. Another great statistical information from Google
analytics is geographical location of your website visitor, the connection speed they are using and also their screen resolution. All of those information is vital for your website development. For example, if you take the time to analyze which area your visitor head to, you can prepare your website better so the traffic is targeted.

All in all, monitoring the Internet traffic is very important for your website's benefit. Fail to manage and monitoring your website traffic will make you more vulnerable to the failure of your website than if you know your internet traffic well.

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