When we are marketing a site, our first goal is to increase the qualified traffic to the site. That is, we want to attract visitors who might be interested in our books. When the site is attracting the right visitors, and attracting those visitors in increasing numbers, then we are increasing the likelihood of selling our books to our target market. So we want to keep our Web site traffic increasing from month to month. To determine whether the traffic is increasing, decreasing, or remaining stable, we must monitor the traffic on the Web site.
Many Web hosting companies offer free traffic analysis software with each site.
Some of this free traffic analysis software is very good, so you should start there. We can use it to easily track the number of hits per day, number of hits in a two-week period, most popular pages, and the referring pages. If the site's host does not offer software for reviewing the site logs, we must install such software, because it's important to track the results of our marketing efforts. Web traffic software tends to be either free or very expensive. In fact WebTrends is among the least expensive of the Web traffic software programs.