Fine-tuning your website: Web counters are your friend.

When your business is getting people to come to a website, read your content, and buy your stuff, you need to have the tools available to you in order to allow you to fine-tune every aspect of that site. To go on gut instinct is just not good enough, and many millions of ecommerce ventures have crumbled because decision-makers decided that they could 'guess' where their site was going wrong.

The cold, hard fact of the matter is - every website needs help. Whether it's your text that doesn't properly sell your product, your design, your hosting, or your content, there's always something that could be better - always a tweak that could be made to make all the difference.

As an example, when we created an unofficial blog for the Vancouver Canadians minor league baseball team, we thought the traffic we were getting was pretty decent, considering the niche market we were in. But soon the traffic was stalling, and no matter how much PR we did, and how many search engines we submitted to, we couldn't get the daily traffic to rise.

Tough break for us, and for most other website owners who go through the same issue, whether they realize it or not. But we weren't content to just let things slide. We knew there was something we could do to make a change in our traffic - we just didn't know what.

Until we installed a free web counter from RiteCounter.com.

Now, we're not making a cent of plugging RiteCounter here - it's just a damn fine (FREE) service that helped us make simple but radically effective changes to the way we do things.

RiteCounter isn't just a web counter that helps you keep track of how many of your cousins and school buddies are visiting your Anna Kournikova tribute page - it's actually a suite of server analysis tools that go deeper than you could ever personally go by just looking at server logs.

Ritecounter counts:

Daily/weekly/monthly/yearly visitors
Hourly performance
Live visitor tracking
Visits per domain
Access time per visitor
Daily statistics
Page impressions per visitor
Most popular pages
Entry/exit pages
Most commonly searched phrases/words Visitors by country/continent
Top referring search engines
Operating systems
Screen resolutions
Browsers used
Visitors by country
...and much more.

It tracks an unlimited number of pages, can be completely invisible if you want it to be, it uses no banners or third party ads, and the company doesn't sell your information on to mailing list companies. You get a weekly email that shows you all the important stats, if you don't have time to keep up manually, and there's a large maximum log file size so you don't have to worry about losing precious information when the data rolls in.

Added to that, it took us two minutes to sign-up, add the counter code, and see our first handful of statistics, which is just incredible in an age where you spend fifteen minutes just signing up for a Hotmail acccount.

There isn't any catch, and that's ultimately what sold us. This is simply a good, free service with no hidden extras and no hassles. And in using the tools that make it run, we determined that the people coming to our website were looking for content that we didn't have a whole lot of. Certain pages were hit a lot, but our front page was lacking that content that people were searching for.

By moving some of that content to our front page, as well as tweaking other small things, such as screen resolution size and making sure our advertisers catered to those niches more closely, the traffic began to ramp up, the time people spent on the site increased, and commissions and profits from advertising and affiliate programs began to improve accordingly.

Since then, we've made more changes - we optimized to take advantage of the increase in Firefox browser use, we provided content for specific locations that was being looked for but not found on our site, and we improved navigation so that you can get to every page from every page.

Traffic numbers haven't looked back since. RiteCounter is responsible, and we recommend it to all our users.

posted by Oz @ 6:13 PM