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So, you’re wondering how many visitors your site’s getting. Is that all you’re wondering?…or, is that all the information you can get? If you only know how many people are visiting your website, then you may be stuck in the dark ages.

You should be getting some great analytics from your website including:

• Who visited your website
• Where your visitors are from
• What they looked at
• How long they stayed on your site
• How they discovered your site (other than direct entry such as bookmark, or retyping the address)
• What browser they were using
• What operating system they were using
• If your visitor was a robot or human
• What keywords they used in a search engine to get to your site
• And many, many more things(you get the idea)…

You are either amazed right now, or extremely bored (because you already knew this :-P). Either way, I’m going to show you some ways to make your life on the web easier. Now, you can achieve all of these analytics pretty easily. To do so, you just need to call a bit of code from your web pages. First of all, it’s best to install analytics software on your own server…BUT, if you are running your blog or website from a free site (or just someone else’s server that you don’t have access to), I would suggest trying StatCounter. StatCounter is free, and offers a great-many features (including most of above-mentioned).

If you’re able to have access to your own server, then you have a few more options for analytics. I’m only going to mention free products since it only makes sense. These free versions include all the options that most enterprise-edition versions offer so you don’t always get what you pay for. Most of these analytics programs run in PHP and a couple make use of MySQL.

A great analytics program with a basic interface and a pretty easy installation is BBClone. BBClone has a basic configuration that you can change around to suit your needs. “Out of the box” BBClone isn’t password protected so I suggest you protect it so other people don’t have access to your stats ;-). If you do end-up downloading BBClone, check out the Cyberience website on how to protect your statistics.

LevelTen Hit Counter is another option available to you. LevelTen has a lot of nice graphics and customization options. It looks as though the installation is easy…but, I believe this is because a lot of the information is coming from LevelTen’s servers themselves and actually isn’t hosted on your server. I don’t know if this is good or not because of the possibility of them having access to your statistics. It might not matter that they have statistics on your particular site, but when you have statistics on hundreds or thousands of sites, you can imagine how much that information is worth.

I would also recommend TraceWatch. TraceWatch has a ton of customizable features and a few features that are very innovative. One such feature is the ability for TraceWatch to gather statistics on different websites through the same interface. This allows you get all of your statistics from one place.

So, after all of this you may wonder what all of this information is good for. This information should allow you to market and tweak your website for optimal results. Using programs like AdSense, you can get advertisements that better match your content. Also, maybe you want to see what keywords your competitors are using to get visitors to their site? There are a few programs available that can help you do that. They’re definitely worth it if you want to get ahead of the competition. A couple of programs that come to mind KeyCompete and WebPosition 4 Trial. WebPosition 4 allows you to submit your site to tons of search engines, check your rankings and keywords, and basically just get an amazing return on investment (ROI). It’s also a free trial so you can check out how it works. KeyCompete is more of a program to allow you to spy on your competition. If you already know how to submit your site, optimize your keywords and get a good ROI, then this may be a better choice for you. And lastly, who isn’t curious to see who their audience is? I know I am!

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