Website traffic analysis

[Raincliffe1]

I was told at a meeting last year that it is useful to analyse the traffic on your website (so you obviously know what is working and what is not). Does anyone know of a free downloadable tool which not just analyses the quantity of traffic and whether they are first time or returning users but also the website which they 'came from' to visit yours.

We participate in an online booking system which had produced little or no direct bookings via it. However, a fellow hotelier states that the referrals to his own website from this booking site are ten times more than the people using it as an online booking facitlity to book his hotel and I wonder does the same happen to me? We constantly ask customers 'how did you find us' but the majority are equally vague, 'it was some website' and you throw a few names at them and they um and ah so to speak.

Katherine

[Sue: White Horse Walking Holidays]

I use Site Meter which gives a reasonable amount of info, including where they've come from and number of page views, and any outlinks. http://www.sitemeter.com
If they've done a search you can see the search word they've used. It's amazing how many think there's a white horse in Avebury. :)

[Der Alte Fritz]

You could try Google Tools which is free. You have to add some code to your website and then they will give you a huge amount of information about keyword searches, time on site, favourite pages, country of origin, etc.

[_Sharpe]

I was told at a meeting last year that it is useful to analyse the traffic on your website (so you obviously know what is working and what is not). Does anyone know of a free downloadable tool which not just analyses the quantity of traffic and whether they are first time or returning users but also the website which they 'came from' to visit yours.

We participate in an online booking system which had produced little or no direct bookings via it. However, a fellow hotelier states that the referrals to his own website from this booking site are ten times more than the people using it as an online booking facitlity to book his hotel and I wonder does the same happen to me? We constantly ask customers 'how did you find us' but the majority are equally vague, 'it was some website' and you throw a few names at them and they um and ah so to speak.

Katherine
I asked my website designer to add site meter and I've been looking at where my traffic comes from this week. It's really interesting. Thanks for the heads up Katherine.

I'm getting an average of 32 hits a day and almost all are from google searches. I got one referral from Visit Britain in the week and a couple from other directory websites. From this, I've decided that my website and search words are the priority.

[wowebuk]

If your hosting account has Cpanel access, have a look at Webalizer and Awstats - both free and should be part of your hosting account.

No statistics package is 100% accurate, but Webalizer and Awstats are probably the best around.

[The_Sanctuary]

We use Google Analytics. It's completely free and fairly simple to use. You register with them, in return you get a snippet of script to add to the bottom of all your website code. That logs all people who have viewed your pages. It includes the referral site (i.e. which website did they come from) which is quite revealing.