We just put a counter on our website to track how many visitors we get. At this point, we only have the counter on the home page. When we look at the details we can see how many of the hits to the home page are returning visitors, and how many are new. We can also see where they came from and a bunch of other stuff. We intentionally put the counter only on the home page because we want to get as close to a true number of visitors as possible (that's one of the issues we had with crazyguy - each time anyone clicked on any of our pages, it counted as one hit. In other words, one person could read the whole journal and rack up 350 hits).
However, I was just reading about how you can use the popular pages data to help set up the website - we can figure out which pages don't get much traffic and try to direct people there with other links and such. That sounds like a good idea. To do that, however, we would need to put the counter on each page. Would putting it on each page just give us a total number of hits for the entire site?? Or would it itemize the list so we know how many are on each page?
For those of you who know this stuff, what kinds of tips and suggestions can you give me? I can see how getting that tracking could be useful once we are really gearing up for our next big trip, but I'm not sure how best to set it all up. Thanks for whatever help you can give me!
However, I was just reading about how you can use the popular pages data to help set up the website - we can figure out which pages don't get much traffic and try to direct people there with other links and such. That sounds like a good idea. To do that, however, we would need to put the counter on each page. Would putting it on each page just give us a total number of hits for the entire site?? Or would it itemize the list so we know how many are on each page?
For those of you who know this stuff, what kinds of tips and suggestions can you give me? I can see how getting that tracking could be useful once we are really gearing up for our next big trip, but I'm not sure how best to set it all up. Thanks for whatever help you can give me!