Can Anyone Hear Me Out There? Finding out who is visiting your website

So you’ve registered your domains. Score. You set them all up and made them appealing. Score. But do you know if anyone seeing them?  Good question.  There are some great ways to capture that feedback, and here are some of them:

Counting Visits

A simple 3rd party counter is often all it takes to make me feel better about the traffic on my domain name.  As someone who is starting out I don’t really care too much about the details.  The most affordable solution is a 3rd party free counter service like what is offered by tinycounter.com.  I have tried this on my blog and it works well enough.  It allows you to either count each website visit, or unique visitors and displays that number on your website.

Other counter services can be found by doing a Google search and can offer all kinds of information such as where the visitor is located, what their IP address is and much more.  The only drawback of having this on the blog, is we’re not sure if they went to the domain to get to the blog or reached it via a search engine.

For more in-depth web stats you would need to actually have your website hosted somewhere, like Webnames.ca.  This allows the information to be given about the domain instead of where it has been pointing to. Webnames.ca has multiple hosting options.

Google Analytics

Now if you want to get really serious, check out Google Analytics

Google Analytics can give you even richer information such as what website they clicked in from to get to your domain, how long they stayed on your website, what pages they viewed, and tonnes more. This can be very interesting, especially if you have lots of content.

Ask Away

Don’t be shy to ask visitors how they heard of you.  You can post a request that they email you this information, a web form, or a survey.

PHP “Yeah You Know Me” (Advanced)

I actually went through a phase where I was obsessed with my web stats – I wanted to be emailed every time I got a visit. I had a webhosting package with PHP and used a PHP mailer so if anyone visited me I’d get notified and do a little happy dance.  One of the best places to learn more about PHP programming is w3schools.com.

I am sure there are other tools out there and if I hear about them I will post them.  Happy Counting!

Photo credit: The Count von Count, from Sesame Street (www.sesamestreet.org)