Tools To Check The Success Of Your Website!
Overview of this week's e-Newsletter
Checking and determining the success of your website might be easier than you thought. This week I'm going to review a few tools you can use to check up on your website. Plus I'll go over the costs (most are free to use) and basic features of each tool.

What Factors Help You Determine Your Site's Success?
What things determine the success of your website.
First its important to know what things define how successful your website is. For most of us it's how many visitors we are getting to our website and/or how many of these visitors are signing up for our services or products.And there are actually several tools that can be used to track both of these for you.

What Tools Can You Use to Check Your Site?
Some tools you can use to check your web site's success.
In recent times we have seen an increase in the tools available to help track our website success and which make it much quicker and easier for us to see the results. One of the most common ways to track the number of visitors to your website is to have a "hit counter". Which is simply a ticker or counter that displays the number of visitors and adds one each time some one views your website. Although this is great, over recently much more sophisticated and intelligent tracking systems have been developed. Here is a list of some of these tools, and best of all most of them are free.

Google Analytics - A counter from Google that is invisible when displayed on your website. Not only does this track the number of visitors to your website but it can tell you detailed information such as where they are located, what site they came from to get to your website (even search engine keywords/phrases they searched for), and one of the most interesting features is that you can setup and track the flow of visitors buying products and services from your website. When tracking the flow of visitors purchasing items from your site you can see who and at what step or web page visitors exited/canceled orders or web pages they used to complete an order.
www.google.com/analytics/
Cost: Free (although you might need someone to set it up for you.)

Stat Counter - One of the most popular website counters prior to the release of Google Analytics. Although it's less sophisticated than Google Analytics it can still let you important data like where people are coming from that view your website, what pages people looked at, and how long viewers spent on your site.
www.statcounter.com
Cost: Free (might need someone to set it up)

Live Visitor Stats - A new and very exciting way of tracking your visitors actually allows you to see who is on your website right now, what pages they are looking at, and how long they have been looking at them. This provides you with a great source of data as to whats happening on your site. Some of the available tools even let you interact with the visitors by sending them chat messages (although that version is not free). A few companies that are offering this service:
www.w3counter.com - Cost: Free (might need someone to set it up)
www.visistat.com - Cost: $19.95 month and larger plans
www.whoson.com - Live stats and live chat. Cost: $45 month

Google Webmaster Tools - This is another free service offered by Google that lets you see some incite into visitors from Google Search. Although a lot of the available features with Google Webmaster Tools are geared towards website designer/developers and alike there are still a few very useful tools to the average website owner. For example you can view your top ranked search keywords/phrases your showing up for, how many visitors are view your site from those keywords/phrases, and another interesting feature lets you see which of your web pages have been included into Google's web search (as not all pages of every website will always be included in Google).
www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Cost: Free (might need help setting it up)

Final Words
Ending comments
Well I hope that informs you about some possible options for interpreting your web site's success and understanding what is going on with visitors to your website.

And as always, look for next week's newsletter where we hope to provide you with more useful tips and advice. If you have any suggestions about topics you would like to hear more about please send us an email with your thoughts.