Tracking Your Visitors - Who's visiting my Blog?

January 6, 2009

It's always interesting to know who's visiting (reading) our Blog...Sometimes, it's just curiosity, but tracking your visitors can also give you important insight regarding:

► country (location) of visitors
► language
► browsers they use
► monitor resolution
► time spent on your site
► visited pages
► percentage of new visitors
...
...and so on...You can see that these are all quite detailed statistics, but don't mix them up with a detective tool that can provide information about individual visitor...It's an overall statistics data, and you will not be able to find out names and personal data of your visitors....

...for a professional Blog, this is a MUST, because, knowing you visitors can help you in optimizing your site, and as a result, gain more readers...

WHAT ARE MY OPTIONS?
I'll make a list of most popular tracking tools. They are all tested, and are used by thousands of Bloggers. You'll have to choose the one you like....or use them all. :]

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SIMPLE HIT COUNTERS

Hit counters will not provide you with a detailed statistics, but they will count your visitors..And they are quite easy to install. If this is what you're looking for, here 's where you can find them:

• Easy hit counters
• Free hit counters
• Bravenet hit counters

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DETAILED COUNTERS AND TOOLS

These are the tools that will provide you with detailed statistic data about your visitors. All of them are free, but also, some of them have an option to upgrade (pay)....


GOOGLE ANALYTICS is quite a powerful tool for analyzing your visitors. It's totally free, made by Google (you can use your existing Google account), no need for placing a counter/gadget on your Blog (it's private).....It's very detailed, well, maybe even too detailed.....Anyway, I would recommend this...
Installing Google Analytics in Blogger





STATCOUNTER is also a good choice. It's free, highly configurable, no ads on your Blog...You have to create an account, set up a project, paste some code, and start analyzing! There's really a bunch of great features....also, check the demo on their website...
Read the instructions: Statcounter tracking in Blogger






SITEMETER has some powerful features. It records unique visitors, and specific page view details about each visitor, but limits itself by unique visitors... The Free SiteMeter service will show you information about the latest 100 unique visitors to your website...you'll have to upgrade (pay) to get some more from it....Read the instructions: SiteMeter tracking in Blogger

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MAPS and REAL-TIME TRACKING

CLUSTR MAPS is a service (a gadget really) that provides you with a code, that will show a map of your visitors. The map shows the locations of all visitors to your page, cumulatively (even for huge numbers). Clicking on it zooms in to a big world map, and (optionally) lets you zoom in to the continents...It's free if you have less than 2500 visitors daily. Try it...it's fun.






FEEDJIT - with this gadget, you can watch your visitors arriving in real-time...It easy to install, and it can also give you some extra traffic...people just love to click...






BLOG CATALOG Recent Viewers widget is a great way to see who's visiting your Blog...It shows the box with a recent visitors + their avatar....You can get some extra traffic with it, it's easy to install, it's customizable, and free of course...To use it, you have to join the BlogCatalog community, which is a positive thing....





MyBlogLog is also one of the great tracking tools. One minor disadvantage: to join in, you need to have a Yahoo account (if you don't have one). But it's not a big deal...you can set up account in a minute. When you have it, you'll register with MyBlogLog, set up a profile, and you're ready to go! Share your online activity, surf around and get noticed.....




Smile!