How Many Hits Does My Website Get?

If you don’t know the answer to that question, you probably don’t have any kind of tracking software or site analytics installed on your website. This is easily remedied.

There are many kinds of trackers and analytics tools available. Many are free, some are not. You can run a search for “site trackers”, “traffic tracking”, “web stats”, “analytics tools”, etc. and see what’s available. You’ll find everything from old fashioned “hit counters” that simply tell you how many visitors have been to the site, to more comprehensive tools that will tell you everything about those visitors – where they are, how they found your site, what they looked at, what kind of system and browser they were using, and how long they stayed. Some will have a lot of bells and whistles – attractive graphics, beautiful interface and design, and more charts and graphs than you’ll ever need, and some will simply provide you with the basic stats.

Probably the most popular and widely approved traffic tracking tool is Google Analytics. If you don’t know where to start, they’re a good first choice. Creating and setting up an account is simple and straight forward, and using it is free. There’s also the extra benefit of Google Analytics being integrated with Google AdWords, so should you decide to try out some pay-per-click advertising, tracking for these will already be installed. Google Analytics is also a good choice if you have more than one website that you’d like to monitor, as you’ll be able to have access to all of them through one account. There is a LOT of information in Google Analytics, but it will definitely tell you how many hits your website gets.

Many site owners will advise you to use more than one kind of hit counter at a time, which definitely indicates that they are never 100% reliable. It’s possible that your tracker may miss a visitor now and then. A small hiccup on their server or yours and a hit or two could slip through the cracks. Or, if you are using a tool that is javascript based (like Google Analytics is) there is a small percentage of users that may block javascript for security reasons, which will leave them out of your results. But whether this is important enough for you to safe guard against it with a second tracker is up to you. If you decide to use more than one site tracking tool, ensuring that one of them is hosted on your server will provide improved accuracy, however the installation will not be as simple. Some web hosts provide site traffic stats as part of their hosting package, though they are often quite basic, providing little detail about visitors.

Knowing how many hits you have, who those visitors are and how they found you is important if you want to improve your website traffic and grow your business. This kind of information allows you to fix what’s not working and capitalize on what is, and is a crucial part of a successful search engine optimization strategy.