Improve your traffic with Traffic Analysis & Statistics packages

In one of my earlier discussions on the probable reasons for the increase in my blog traffic, I have pointed out the importance of understanding your blog traffic. It is not just enough to have a simple hit counter that counts the page impressions. You need a statistical package that gives you much more insight and knowledge of your traffic. Let me introduce some of the statistical packages that I have tried hands-on. These sites provide the basic packages absolutely free.

1. StatCounter.com: This is one of the best statistical packages available. It provides the basic information like page visits, unique visitors and returning visitors. It provides a list of popular pages, listed in the descending order. You could drill down each page to find out who referred this page to your visitor. It provides a list of entry pages and exit pages. Another important feature is the keyword analysis. Overall, it is a good package I would recommend you to sign up.

2. Google Analytics: This is the statistics package that comes from Google. It is an excellent package too. It gives you a dashboard to customize what reports you want to see on the front page. It provides all necessary information like page visits, unique visitors, returning visitors, where did the visitors come from, popular pages and so on.

3. SiteMeter.com: This is another popular package available for free. SiteMeter does not currently track Unique Visits/Visitors. One important feature here is it provides a traffic prediction based on your current traffic. This might be useful if you would like to market your site to your potential advertisers.

Each site is using a unique way to calculate the visits. So, the statistics provided by one site might not be identical with the statistics from another site. Regardless of the absolute numbers, the general trend should be similar. The details like where the visitors came from or the browser they are using should be similar. Depending on your requirements, you can sign up any of the above services. There might be restrictions on the free packages. But, the free services should be sufficient enough if you do not have very high traffic.