Lost in all the sage advice on how to get hordes of traffic to your websites, is the absolute necessity for you to have a clear picture of just who those visitors are, along with the wealth of information that brings with it. This is a crucial piece of website marketing, and one that shouldn’t be thought of as something to get to later. It can actually make the difference between a profitable site and one that just gets by, or worse! Let’s look at some of the reasons why you need to track your website visitors, and how you can easily accomplish this.

Unique Visitors - Obviously one of the primary reasons you want to track web traffic is to have an idea of how many unique visitors you are getting. This will give you a benchmark and help you decide what efforts you need to make in ramping up further traffic.

Referral Traffic – This may be the most important reason you track your visits. Knowing where your visitors are coming from, and which sites are sending you the most and highest quality traffic is a goldmine of valuable information. You can see which sites are proving to be vital assets, and whether or not you’re getting any organic traffic from the search engines, helping you to plan campaigns accordingly.

Entry and Exit Pages – Which page do they enter your site from, and which one do they leave from. This is very good information to have, as you can see which of your pages are doing well and which ones need help.

Search Terms – Another biggie. You absolutely need to know the keyword terms that people are searching on to get to your site. Often the first time you look at this it is a total surprise, as terms you didn’t think you were targeting are bringing you a good amount of visits. This type of info can help you decide how to best expand your site to include the types of content your visitors are searching for.

These are but a sampling of the vast amount of stats you can get on your site, even with the simplest of website traffic tracking.

There are many programs out there that can help you with this, some free and others paid. Many webmasters simply look into the stats rendered to them by their web hosts, and this is a good start.

Google Analytics is another free and extremely useful tool to help you with this type of tracking. Simply install a line of code on your pages and that’s it, instant tracking.

Other popular programs out there include such as 103Bees, FeedBurner, CrazyEgg, snoop and ClickTale all provide wonderful abilities to give you an incredibly detailed view of your website’s traffic patterns.

Whichever program you decide you employ, make sure you do it sooner rather than later. It will save you time and money, I promise!