Analyzing the visitors to your Plug-In Profit Site

Once you have your Plug-In Profit Site and you've started to promote your site by building up links, article submission, Search Engine Optimization, traffic exchanges, list building, directory submission, forum posting and more, you need to know whether or not your efforts are paying off.

The obvious result is that you will start to make sales and get signups to the affiliate programs that are part of the Plug-In Profit Site. You will know when this is happening as you will begin to receive emails with the following subject lines:

"New Host4Profit Account" - From Host4Profit
"Suzanne Your Efforts are Paying off" - From Empowerism
"New Affiliate (Joe Bloggs)" - from SFI

If you have not reached that stage yet, you still need to monitor your progress. The best way to do this is to analyze the visitors to your site. The sort of things you may want to look at are:

(1) The total number of unique visitors to your site per day
(2) Where your visitors come from (e.g. search engine, another website)
(3) What keywords are people using in the search engines to find your site
(4) Which pages on your site are the most popular
(5) Entry and Exit Pages
(6) The path that your visitor takes through your site (which pages they visit in which order)
(7) The countries that your visitor come from
(8) The length of time that your visitors spend on your site

The good news is that Host4Profit provides a tool called Webalizer that provides you with 1-5 above.

Just go to http://yourwebsite.com/stats or login to your WebEPanel and click on the stats button.

On the first page you'll see some graphs and you can find out the number of daily and monthly visitors, files, hits, pages and site. The most important stat is Visitors and you should be aiming to increase this every month.

If you then click on one of the months in the list you can see a full breakdown of your stats. Click on the Entry and Exit links to quickly see a list of the different pages that your visitors arrive on your site at and the last page they visit before leaving.

Click on Referrers to find out which websites referred your visitors. If I look at my stats, one of my top referers is Google, showing that the majority of my visitors come from the Google search engine. I can also see the URLs of article directories that I have published some of my articles on, showing that my article submission is paying off.

Click on URLs to find out which pages on your site are the most popular. The URL of each of the visited pages on your site will be listed here along with the number of times that it has been visited that month.

Finally, you can also click on Search to see the keywords that are being used to find your site on search engines.

The Webalizer stats will give you a good overall picture of how you are doing with your site promotion. You should aim to review your stats at least once a month to see how you are doing. Read the Webalizer Stats Quick Help Guide here.

If you want to go one step further I would recommend installing StatCounter. StatCounter is free from StatCounter.com and is far superior to the Webalizer stats. This will provide you with far more detail than Webalizer including information about how the visitors move between the different pages on your site (visitor paths), the length of time that your visitors spend on your site and the countries that your visitors come from.

You can see an example of the stats provided by StatCounter here.