How to track your website visitors

http://powerup.tv/ What exactly is a web tracker (also known as a visitor tracker or site tracker), and why do you need one?

The idea behind a web tracker is very simple and has been around for many years. Essentially you place a small piece of code on your website, when someone visits your website, that small piece of code is executed and the visitor's public details (ip address, browser, operating system, referrer, page title and url etc) are analysed and stored for reporting to you later.

The great advantage of web trackers are that they are better at tracking 'real people' as they track browsers NOT server requests. This often means a web tracker will have a significantly lower count than standard log file analysis. But it offers a more realistic figure of the visitors to your website and far more detail. At StatCounter our web tracker is provided in real-time so it's even better still.

A web tracker also records your visitors if they return to the same page twice or more. This does not happen with log files. Your page would be already cached in your browser. No request would be sent to the server. That user activity would go unreported. Thanks to web trackers and their use of a random javascript number - your counter is forced to load each time and your visitor is tracked.

As web trackers only track 'real people', it is not able to tell you when a search engine spider is indexing your website. For information like this you need a good log analyser.

StatCounter.com can produce far different results to standard log file analysis. This is not surprising as our system is designed to track browsers NOT server requests. This can result in a significantly lower count than standard log file analysis. But it offers a more realistic figure of the visitors to your website and far more detail and it is provided in real-time!

So how do they differ?

A big factor is the placement of the StatCounter tracking code. You can use StatCounter to only track the pages you want by simply placing it on the pages you want to track. Log file analysis will track all server requests by default.

If you have very large, slow loading pages it is recommended to place the tracking code closer to the top of the page instead of the bottom. Or a visitor may exit your page before the page finishes loading and the tracking script will never have been loaded.

Framed websites can cause a big problem for log file analysis resulting in an over-inflated count. When a visitor visits a singe page that could often be recorded as 3 visits - loading the main frame, a side frame and a footer. StatCounter does not have this problem.

Cached pages are another huge problem for log file analysis this time resulting in a very poor undercount of visitors. Often your own local ISP will keep a cache of many websites you visit regularly. This speeds up your use of the web - unfortunately no server request is made to your website when this happens. And your visit will go uncounted. This does not happen with StatCounter with the use of javascript and a random variable each time.

Web Proxies - many users, most noticeably AOL users access the web through a web proxy. Their ip address can change on each request to your website so log file analysis could not accurately count your unique visits. StatCounter does both - we use a simple cookie and the user's ip address.

Robots - the requests made to your website by robots will be recorded in your log files but it will not be recorded by StatCounter.

Overall StatCounter provides a far more detailed, accurate count and tracking of behavior of the 'real' visitors to your website than standard log file analysis.

Of course the only way to experience our advanced web tracker for yourself is to register right now for your free account.

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Closed Caption:

hello and welcome to a special video on
how to track your visitors to your
website so when someone visits your
website they should be aware of tracking
your visitors and i'm going to show you
now the first thing that you need to do
is head over to one of my favorite
counters which is called scott caan
statcounter com
ok so i'll just click on step counter
link
ok and one thing i'm going to do is now
is register on this website so i'm going
to click on register now
ok what you need to do now is basically
you need to enter your username email
password on your details and then just
click on the register account once
you've done that you login and enter
your password so what I'm going to do is
I'm going to log into this website
ok as you can see i'm logged in and what
you want to do is head over to where it
is a new project and click on add new
project
ok and once you've done that this entity
website title so my website and enter
your website URL so BB . easy access the
videos . come forward slash test us what
we're going to do a test the URL this
then he sucked a category so for example
entertainment marketing i usually leave
this is default these sayings and let's
click on next okay next
what you need to do is we should take
you to the page so should say
congratulations your project has been
created and then he needs configure and
install your code so you just going to
click on configure and install cord
once you've done that I usually head
over to invisible counter and then click
on next
ok i usually leave these things alone
and click on next again and then you
should have your statcounter cord which
is here so what you need to do is you
need to select record copy
I need to piss that on your between the
body of your webpage so head over to the
webpage the code tag we just click on
after the body tag
so that will be
just let me just go back
just after the body tag so we'll paste
court as you can see this is statcounter
code is click on save us save so what we
want to do now is upload this web file
to our page
ok here you are my ftp i'm going to
simply upload this file
ok alright this once you do not this
head over to statcounter and it should
start trucking your file your page look
as you can see it's already trapped our
webpage go go to website click refresh
several times with fresh bone as you can
see it's already trapped our webpage and
all the information and stats appear if
it's blue that means unique riches of
his green that means sales page loads
and if arrange that means is returning
visitors
ok that's the one way of checking your
tracking your visitors the second where
is using your host so what I'm going to
do is I'm going to head over to my host
and i'm gonna show you how to view your
visitors okay if you are on logged in on
our host and as you can see we've got
various options here variety of options
what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna
take you to the page where it says web
ftp steps just click on that ok
it is in this area you can view 6 by a
website please be aware that only a test
for these visitors the life feat almost
obsolete reports updated every 24 hours
so basically this is kinda laid and
compared to start counting but it still
does the same thing so what we need to
do when you click on more steps
ok once you click on your stats ok here
you can see the visitors on your website
from certain certain days generally of
got here unique visitors to the domain
night in 1820 and so on
ok and as you can see at the bomb
it's just got serious with the stats for
example keywords what people type into
find your web page etc so this is pretty
good when it comes to checking your
stats analyzing visitor information for
your website
okay i hope you enjoyed watching this
video I hope you learned something new
and I hope you go ahead and start adding
statcounter and start using your stats
website thank you very much