So what is traffic? We are not talking about the kind of traffic on the highway. We are talking about what traffic is when you are talking about online businesses. Why is this word so important that it's got everyone shelling out tons of money to get some of it? Well, traffic is the amount of people that you have viewing your site on a daily basis. How many people come to your site, and how long are they staying? These are just a few questions you can answer with your web site traffic.

So how do you track traffic to a website? Well, the truth is, there are tons of ways that you can track traffic to your website. One of the most used and common ways is to use a hit counter. This counts how many times people have landed on your website. The only problem with this is, it's not really looking at your traffic, it's just looking at your web site hits. You have no way of being able to see how much traffic you get in a day or where it's coming from. Remember, you need to know more than just how many hits you have on a daily basis.

For your stats to mean anything to you, you need to know how much traffic you are getting everyday and where most of it is coming from. When you know that, you will know what kind of ads or keywords are helping out your business the most. If an ad is sending a lot of targeted traffic to your website, then you know that it is worth paying for that ad. However, if an ad is not driving any good traffic to your website, then you know that it's not worth paying for the ad. Using stats is the key to protect your online advertising budget. Its a must have item specially when you are running a pay per click advertising campaign. By analyzing your stats you can identify which keywords are bringing a good ROI and adjust your campaign accordingly.

By looking at your stats you'll have a list of key phrases people searched for to get to your website on a page by page basis so you can optimize for these phrases and get more traffic in the organic search engine results. Google analytics has an optional search feature that gathers search data about what people look for after they come at your website.

Getting good traffic is not something that is very easy to do, but it can be done. Do not let people say that a hit counter is all you need. That may be enough for a personal website, but not a business website. Keeping up with this stuff is very important, and it's something that you are going to need to do everyday. Getting traffic to your web site without analyzing it, is like being blindfolded while driving a race car. Sure you can move the car but you can forget about winning the race.

Serge Dandelin, 
 

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