How do you monitor traffic?

**Learning Newbie** · 02-07-2007, 06:29 PM

Hi,

I'll be ready to launch my site in a little over a week. I've already got much of it online. I haven't told anyone the address, published any links, or anything at all like that. So that means I'm invisible, and every click on my site has come from me. Pretty soon that won't be the case.

Thus far I've spent 90 % of my energy on content, writing style, finding appropriate images to help with the concepts I'm writing about, and so on. As I come into the home stretch, I'm working on type-faces, color schemes, and things of that nature. By the time I launch, hype will me my focus, and I want to know what kind of effect different things I try will have.

I've got a copy of SQL Server, and I noticed that DTS has an FTP task. Is this the best way to get my server logs into SQL Server so I can analyze them? I can keep a copy of the things I do to generate hype, and what pages I throw links out to, and when, and I want to be able to correlate this to how much traffic I get over the next few days, and what pages the traffic is coming to.

Anybody know how to do this?

**trichnosis** · 02-07-2007, 10:32 PM

i think you are on the wrong forum

**Learning Newbie** · 02-07-2007, 10:40 PM

Well this one seemed better than the Google forum, because I want to be able to correlate trends in my web site's traffic no matter where the people come from?

**hiredesigner** · 02-08-2007, 03:02 AM

For traffic analysis, enter the same term in google and you will get lot of sites. You can use any one of them to know your sites traffic.

**jaguar-archie15** · 02-08-2007, 03:22 AM

Lot of free stats monitoring available online but i preferred you to use Google Analytics.

**Janna122003** · 02-08-2007, 03:22 AM

I use statcounter and google analytics to monitor my site traffic

**gringo** · 02-08-2007, 03:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hiredesigner

For traffic analysis, enter the same term in google and you will get lot of sites. You can use any one of them to know your sites traffic.

That's not true. If you do a search for a particular term, you get the number of pages relevant to that term. This has nothing to do with traffic. This is competition.

I use Google Analytics, and it's pretty good.

**astrojith** · 02-08-2007, 10:08 AM

Gum stats is also good. But Google Analytics is the best. Its free too.

**Learning Newbie** · 02-08-2007, 03:03 PM

Interesting. Google Analytics. Can anyone tell me what this offers over server logs? It looks like there are nice fancy charts I don't get, and I know Google is pretty good at organizing data, but why do you people use this instead?

Thanks.

**Republikin** · 02-08-2007, 03:09 PM

With Google Analytics you can set conversion goals, monitor ad campaigns through adwords and much more. It's free to sign up so I suggest you just log in and check out all it offers, you'll see the advantage soon.

As a side note, Google Analytics used to be Urchin Analytics which was/is used by about 20% of the top 500 companies in the US.

**regaton** · 02-09-2007, 12:30 PM

i use statscounter and google analytics, they are both good