How can you monitor your Internet traffic? It makes sense to keep tabs on how many people are visiting your websites, how much time they spend looking at the material you offer and what they are doing with the information they gain from your sites. If you don't bother monitoring your traffic - then all the effort you put into creating a good site and writing great content is wasted. You have no idea how your sites are performing in the real (or rather virtual) world.
Deciding which monitoring methods are best for you depends (unsurprisingly) on who you are, what you wish to achieve and how well the monitoring tools on offer fit in to your working pattern and even your lifestyle. If you're setting out with a fairly basic website or blog, you might start with a basic hit counter such as the one offered by 'Sitemeter'. This comes as a simple piece of html code that you can place on your site. You can opt either to make the counter generally visible to your readers - or to keep it hidden. You can also sign up to receive weekly updates from Site Meter by email.
When they first start out monitoring their web traffic, most people get fairly obsessed by the highs and lows of it. You might find the number of hits rises suddenly and then reaches a frustrating plateau. Don't get too concerned about this, it's not just the number of hits that counts. It's regular and dedicated readers. As soon as you start analysing internet traffic in more depth - you're delving into more far-reaching tools for monitoring.
Register with Google Analytics, (or spend more time with Sitemeter) and you'll glean all sorts of other, useful information about your readers and/or your customer base. It's not surprising that many companies employ full time staff to analyse these sorts of statistics and make recommendations accordingly. Monitored stats can tell you exactly how your readers found your site, how many readers are currently online or where your readers (or customers) are based.
Monitoring can also tell you heaps about the all-important conversion rate of your site. Basically, it is one thing to visit a site and leave again (without signing that petition, or spending any money). It's quite another when a customer visits your site and signs up to a mailing list or purchases a product. Monitoring so-called 'conversion' rates is vital - and you can do it with appropriate analytics software like Google Analytics. Many off-the-shelf websites and blogs like Wordpress also now have in-built mechanisms for tracking traffic and links over time.