Moron Monday: Tracking Your Traffic

Posted on December 31st, 2007 in Retards

If you're tired of refreshing this page every day like a d-bag, you should probably subscribe to the RSS feed.

First off, happy new years peeps.  Party safe tonight.

Ok, last week’s moron monday was about getting your site quickly indexed by search engines to start bringing in a little traffic.  So how do you keep track of your progress?

Recording and understanding statistics is very important for developing sites.  Traffic = money and especially when you’re starting out, figuring out what methods of generating tracking are working best is key, because you will want to repeat those later for any new sites you make.

Here are a couple methods you can use to start tracking your traffic:

• Google Analytics
  Google Analytics is probably the easiest way to track all your traffic stats.  They give you pretty traffic graphs with a lot of useful statistics including bounce rate, traffic sources, etc.  It’s pretty easy to install on your site (you just paste a piece of code into whatever template you’re using, or onto every html page if you’re not using a template type system).  It has a few drawbacks, though.  It only updates every 24 hours so you can’t see your stats in realtime.  Also, for the paranoid, Google gets to see all your traffic data, so if you’re worried about that, you may want a different system.
• AWStats
  AWStats is a free traffic log analyzer.  Most hosting providers have awstats for free which you can access from CPanel.  It updates in realtime and gives a lot of good data, but leaves something to be desired in the presentation department.
• eXTReMe Tracking
  Ok, so at first, these guys seem like a complete joke.  You put this annoying graphic on your page (or hide the image in a div or something), and you will get to track your web stats for free.  It seems really ghetto and their site design is garbage, but the realtime tracking and stats presentation is actually not bad, especially for a newb.

That should be enough to get you started tracking your pages.  Make sure to note where most of your traffic is coming from so you can repeat it later.