• Number of visitors each day/week/month
• Number of page views each day/week/month
• How much your traffic is increasing over time
• How are people getting to your site
• What specific search terms people are using to find your site through search engines
• What Web page people were on before they landed on your page
• How long people stay on the site
• How many pages they visit
• Which pages are the most popular
• What countries or regions your visitors come from

You  may want to use more than one statistics counter to get a full picture  of your website traffic patterns.  Here are a few options:

1. Statistics from your blog or website host

Check  to see what kind of statistics you’re already getting from your blog or  website host, and consider what other data you may be able to get from  external sources.

2. Google Analytics

Google offers a free statistics counter at www.google.com/analytics. You’ll need to log in with your Google user name and password to set up your analytics account.

One nice feature of Google Analytics is a chart of where your website traffic comes from. Here’s what mine looks like:

Search  engine traffic comes from web searches (primarily on Google), Direct  Traffic refers to people who came directly to the site, Referring Sites  means that someone clicked a link from another website to get to my  site, and Other includes things like traffic generated by RSS feeds.

3. Other statistics counters There  are a number of other statistics counting services available, both free  and paid. I use Google Analytics along with the free service at www.StatCounter.com.  The StatCounter interface isn’t as pretty as Google Analytics, but I  find it easier to use for quick traffic checks, and I’m able to exclude  my IP address from the counter so that my visits to my own websites  don’t get counted.Savvy Tip: To find out your computer or network’s IP address, go to www.WhatisMyIPAddress.com.

Good to Know

If  you’re using an external statistics counter, they will provide you with  a snippet of code to place on your own website. On a blog you can place  the code in a widget or sidebar item. In most cases, you will want to  select an “invisible” counter so that the code is not visible to  visitors.

Don’t  be surprised to find that you’re getting different numbers from  different statistics counters. They don’t all use exactly the same data  capture methods, but the overall trends should be similar.