Do you know:

Exactly how many people are visiting your website
How long they’re staying on your site before they move on
Exactly where those visitors are coming from, each day
How much of your website traffic is repeat visitors
The exact paths people take as they click their way through your website

Here is what I am getting at:

If you do not know your visitors, it makes it very difficult for you to improve the performance of your website and turn more visitors into customers AND get more quality traffic. For the simple reason that you are effectively working blind.

 
Without knowing how people visit your site and what they do on your site, any attempts at growing your traffic and improving the profitability of your website is working with one armed tied behind your back, at least.

And unfortunately the web stats that come with your web hosting are generally not enough these days.

Depending on your web host, chances are you have either got Webalizer, Analog Stats, or AWStats installed on your server. Here’s how that software works

It takes the raw unreadable to the human eye information your web server stores of everyone that visits and presents this in an easy to understand way.

Unfortunately, due to a number of technical reasons, this information is often presented in quite an inaccurate way.

And in my personal experience, these software packages do not present this information in a particularly helpful way either for someone trying to improve the conversion ratios and profitability of their website.

What I personally do, and what I would suggest you do is use a Tracking Solution that accurately tracks and reports all your visitors in an easy to read and understand way. These solutions come in two forms Software & Services

Both these options have their pros and cons, but what they both do very well is present exactly what is happening on your website right up to the minute, and in a way that is very helpful to you for making good and profitable decisions for your business.

To start with here is a software solution you can install and use for free on your website

Now before you go and install it, you should of course be familiar with installing software on your server. If you are not comfortable installing software on your website, a tracking service which I will come to in a moment would probably be best for you.

And it is also important to note that installing software on your website can often put more strain on the server. This is particularly true if you are on shared hosting.

I have personally used the following free tracking software and it works well. See what you think.

But personally speaking, what I have found works very well and avoids putting any increased strain on my existing websites is using a third party tracking service.

The only things really to worry about when using a third party service are

How long will this service be around If they stop their service after a year, you would not be able to access your past data and will have to change all your tracking codes on your pages too.
What is their privacy policy regarding my web stats Are they honest and trustworthy in other words. You do not want the service owners studying and then duplicating your successful business plan.

Over the past month I have been using ecommStats www.ecommstats.com. Now, this service is not free, but at this time they give you 50,000 free page views per domain, and depending how busy your site is those page views can last you a very long time.

The service works great and is very easy to add to your pages simply add three lines of code at the bottom of each of your pages you can easily do this with Server Side Includes if you are comfortable with that and all your visitors get tracked accurately and in great detail.

Alternatively an entirely free at this time and very established service is Stat Counter statcounter.com. It even has a rave review from Tucows.com one of the largest download sites on the internet which speaks for itself and adds a lot of credibility to the service.

And just in case you are wondering how a free service like Stat Counter makes money, well since it is such a popular service with many webmasters logging in every day and many I am sure even more than once a day just like me that it is made it very easy for them to sell a lot of advertising on their site. They also offer an upgrade to their advanced paid service.

But thinking beyond free services, as your business grows you may choose to upgrade to high end paid services that provide even more in depth information about your visitors.

Services like Urchin Urchin.com owned by Google or Deep Matrix DeepMetix.com. However, to help you grow your business to that point you need to keep a close eye on what your visitors are doing and where they are coming from and free tracking software and services is a great way for you to start to do this. 

About the Author: Did you find this article useful? For more useful tips and hints, points to ponder and keep in mind, techniques, and insights pertaining to Internet Business, do please browse for more information at our websites.
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website traffic, web development

In this era of technological developments, owing a website has become almost compulsory to be successful. It gives you an opportunity to actively participate in ecommerce and open multiple revenue channels for yourself. To host your website on the Web, you require help of a web hosting provider by choosing one of its available hosting plans. This poses a challenge.

To mark your online presence, you choose a domain name and get your website designed by competent, skilled and experienced web designers and developers but now comes the real challenge. After having met the first challenge, you need to show the face of your online business through your website to the world. How?

You’d need to host your website on the server on World Wide Web. For this, you need help of a reliable web hosting provider such as LimeDomains, HostGator, FatCow etc. to name a few. Once you’ve made your selection of web hosting providers, you’re supposed to choose one of their hosting plans that does not create any hole in your pocket and yet addresses your business requirements adequately.

You must make sure that the hosting plan that you choose follows all required functional specifications as this important aspect would determine the growth rate of your online business. Also, you must attempt to pick a service that does not suffer from frequent outages and that fetches your website maximum uptime. Conduct an extensive Internet research to find reviews and customer feedback about the services and the hosting plan of the concerned hosting provider.

Obviously being in online business, you would not want a website that crashes every now & then and your customers face lots of difficulties in making the payments and transactions. If this happens, you’d be put in a real awkward situation besides losing out considerably on the revenue side.

Also the plan that you choose must provide you adequate bandwidth and data transfer limit. If your website has multimedia elements then certainly it would have high bandwidth requirements and corresponding disk space for their storage. To strike a balance between these requirements is the key consideration and calls for careful planning. In addition, you must see to it that the technical and customer support services are available 24 × 7 and the customer service must not be billed. It must be offered to you absolutely free of cost.

Next the web hosting plan that is chosen by you must be accessible remotely. It implies that using its control panel, you’re able to install varied scripts, manage your email boxes etc. Besides everything mentioned above, you also need to see that the price of the web hosting plan is affordable for you. Don’t just go by the word ‘cheap prices’! It’s a catch. Choose a plan that fits in your budget and meets all your site requirements appropriately.

Choose your web hosting plan to get your website up & running!

About the Author: Ryan Hudson is an online marketing consultant and has worked with renowned organizations and published authors for more than 5 years now. With stupendous professional business writing related to the topic Web Hosting, Domain name, Domain name registrar, Web applications etc… And a penchant for traveling around the world, Ryan has got a lot to say.

Today, almost all the people need web presence for their respective personal/business objectives. One needs to set up a website for the same, which is very easy owing to the easily available web hosting services. Web hosting service is quite advantageous for you if you use them intelligently to reach out to your target audiences. Your choice of a suitable web hosting provider matters a lot here.

Everyone’s going online! With technological advancement at its pinnacle, each one of use wishes to reap its advantages for our personal/business reasons. If you have recently stepped into the business world, a well setup website is a must for you for being able to connect with your potential customers and make them aware about your products and services.

For building a website, you’d need a domain name and after you have a domain, you’d need the help of a web hosting provider for giving a space to your website on their server. Now you must be thinking how web hosting can help you? Well, the answer to this is simple. You need a connecting link between your website and your target audiences and this connecting link is formed by web hosting so that people can access your website easily anytime, anywhere.

These services are fairly available at varied prices varying as per the level of services offered. Now it’s your call as prices are one of the biggest concerns for a netizen willing to opt for such services.

Choosing a right provider is the real challenge since wisely chosen provider can offer you all that you want i.e., bandwidth, disk space, email boxes, backup servers, technical & customer support service. Web hosting can help you a lot in marketing your products and services and saves your considerable amount of time that you’d have otherwise spent on offline marketing. It also fetches you customer loyalty.

Now that you have your website set up on the main network server, you can formulate several strategies for enhancing your product and improving your business thereon. You can intelligently make use of these services to convey your message directly to your potential customers instantly and effectively. Letting your target audiences know what your business is all about is your main target that web hosting services make you easily achieve that.

People no longer have the patience to go through yellow pages to find out what they’re looking for. They prefer to search it online, which again highlights on the importance of owning a website and utilizing web hosting service. Don’t let your competitors outpace you only because you don’t use web hosting services.

There are a number of good web hosting providers running currently such as LimeDomains, HostGator, FatCow etc. that can help you translate your online dreams into reality and successfully establishing your online identity on the World Wide Web.

Get started with web hosting today!

About the Author: Ryan Hudson is an online marketing consultant and has worked with renowned organizations and published authors for more than 5 years now. With stupendous professional business writing related to the topic Web Hosting, Domain name, Domain name registrar, Web applications etc… And a penchant for traveling around the world, Ryan has got a lot to say.

It’s obvious that paid services always have an edge over free ones. This is true in case of web hosting also. It’s not that free hosting is not chosen by any one. Scores of people who have low budget to spend online opt for free hosting most of the time. But people, who have large-scale business requirements always choose paid web hosting.

To begin with, online business requirements fall into two broad categories-low scale & high scale. Depending on the needs web visitors choose web hosting plans. Some amateurs and netizens, who have less bandwidth requirements go for free hosting. However people and organizations, which have high bandwidth requirements for their corporate websites and online businesses such as online stores etc . most often choose paid web hosting as they need reliable and supportive hosting devoid of any sort of pitfalls.

Talking about the technical aspects of free vs. paid web hosting, it’s these features that categorize the two hosting options.

1) Data Transfer

This is the most challenging aspect in both kinds of hosting plans. Web visitors hate slow sites. So people who anticipate large turnover of visitors to their sites must always seek paid hosting. Such sites are visited by people, who have processing requests, product queries etc. In that case, if the site gives a sluggish response and the processing requests take a considerable amount of time then your entire online effort may go in vain. Bandwidth determines the pace of speed transmission, which is the call of the hour. Free hosting gives very limited data transfer limit. So it’s good that first you evaluate your bandwidth requirements and then choose free/paid hosting accordingly.

2) Disk/Storage Space

It’s the allocation of space that differs in these two hosting arrangements-free and paid. It depends on two aspects: nature of business and number of web visitors. If you have large online requirements then never attempt to compromise on disk/storage space since it’s an important determinant of the fate of your website. Estimate your disk/storage space requirements precisely and choose free/paid hosting. Paid hosting always gives you greater disk/storage space, which adds pace to your website besides freedom to experiment.

3) E-mail Accounts

When you choose your Web Hosting Provider, foresee your requirements and operation of affairs. If you have limited requirements, you can rest with few email accounts. However, bigger sites and businesses often need a greater number of e-mail accounts, which can only be obtained with paid hosting plans. This is an extended benefit in paid hosting when you compare it with free hosting.

There are a number of web hosting providers that offer free as well as paid hosting such as LimeDomains, Network Solutions, HostGator etc. So now that you’re all set to begin your online journey, you must have determined your online business requirements. If yes, then go ahead and choose free/paid web hosting accordingly.

About the Author: Ryan Hudson is an online marketing consultant and has worked with renowned organizations and published authors for more than 5 years now. With stupendous professional business writing related to the topic Web Hosting, Domain name, Domain name registrar, Web applications etc… And a penchant for traveling around the world, Ryan has got a lot to say.