How many unique visitors do you get every week? Where are they coming from? What are they looking at and how long are they staying? No matter what kind of online business you have, tracking your visitors is vital to its survival. Marketing is a tricky game and it takes a lot of testing to find out what will work for you.
Putting a counter on your site is not enough. You need more information than an obscure number that may or may not be accurate. There are many programs and services that will help you track your visitors and make sense of your confusing logs.
If you have access to your own cgi-bin, your best bet is to download a copy of the AXS tracking software. It is completely free and fairly easy to install and use. For more information on this program go to http://www.xav.com/scripts/axs/.They have a demo of the program so you can see it in action.
If you do not have access to your own cgi-bin, don't worry, there is an alternative. There are several services out there that will track your visitors for you. Extreme tracking is one of those services and it is free. In exchange all you have to do is place a small image on your site. If you do not wish to do that, they have a paid version. Check it out at http://www.extreme-dm.com/
Both of these solutions will tell you how many unique visitors you have had and what links they clicked on to get there. It will be easy to see what web sites have linked to you and how many hits they are generating for you.
But what about e-mail ads? These programs can't tell you what e-zine your visitors came from without a little extra work.
When linking to your site, you can add a simple tag to the end of your address that will be ignored by the browser but will be seen by your tracking software. If you are advertising your site in the NetNews e-zine then add ?netnews to the end of your address (http://www.bizbot.net?netnews). You can still click through to the site as normal but when you look at your stats, you will be able to see where they came from.
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