If you are a website owner you will want to know how many visitors you are getting to your website, sources from where the traffic came from, what country they are from, etc. This information may interest you just for curiosity or for development of your business but it’s very difficult to take right decisions if you don’t have complete information.

What do the visitors do when they arrive to your website? Are your potential customers leaving your site just seconds after their arrival? If you don’t have an answer to these then how would you create a good strategy to offer your visitors a better experience on your website?

The key is not getting lost in a mountain of numbers, but really focusing on the few statistics that are more important to your business. The concept is simple: keeping users engaged on your site will help to retain them, increase conversion rates, and consistently help deliver more revenue.

There are many hit counters and web site traffic statistics services on the Internet. Some of them are free, some of them are paid. Some of them are very simple and provide you with minimal information, some of them provide in depth information about your website visitors.

What is important is to identify your real needs, and find a service that satisfy all of them, or at least the most important ones. Don’t pay for services you don’t need or services you can find elsewhere for free.

Some features you may need are:

Unique visitors and pageloads: More pageloads per visitor means your visitors are more interested in your website, but this may also mean that they are looking for something and they are not able to find it on your website.

Referring URL’s will let you know which other web sites are driving traffic to your website.

Search engine statistics and keywords used.

Popular pages: what are the most visited pages on your web site, and which are the ones least visited.

Most traffic comes from which countries.

Visitor browser, screen resolution, operating system.

Having all these web site statistics will let you know who is visiting your site, what web pages are the most popular and also the ones that are very rarely used. You will learn which search engines are sending you traffic, and what keywords they are using to find your web site. They can even tell you what browser and screen resolution your visitors are using.

Your web site traffic statistics are an extremely valuable information for your business. You will be able to make decisions on improving your site through the information they give you. Observing your visitors’ behavior will help you address the issues they are having with your website.