Where does most of your horse site's traffic come from?

Chances are very high that the majority of your current traffic comes from search engines?  You really need to setup some useful and informative traffic tracking! These are also sometimes known as web site statistics packages or analytics. 

You might have free web tracking from your web site host.

That's a good start. Check it out. Those free web site traffic tracking packages you get with your web hosting provider are OK but they are somewhat limited. 

The first limitation is location. If you move your web site to another host, you have to start all over again with all new data because all of yours is gone for good.   It will probably be in a different format too.

Another limitation is configurability.  These packages are setup on the host server to a certain configuration.  For example, you might see the top 10 referrers (the sites who send you traffic).  What if you want to see the top 20? Unless you have a hosting account with more rights which allow you to configure your account and you have the technical expertise and time to modify the variables you are interested in, you are stuck with the way it is setup.

You need to know how much and the kind of traffic your site is getting for a lot of reasons.

Not only do you need a benchmark to check your progess on improving your web site's traffic, but you also can measure the effectivness of your paid ads and links placed on other web sites.   
It is suprising sometimes to see how a web site you thought would send you a lot of traffic does not.  Equally interesting is how another site that you did not think would work very well manages to send you more visitors than expected.

Tips to understanding traffic

Make sure you know the difference between hits and unique visitors. These terms get thrown around far too loosely.  Many people use the term "hits" thinking that it means visitors.  They might tell you that they have 100 hits when they might only have 10 unique visitors.  By the way, you can still have 15 total visitors and only 10 unique visitors if people come back to your site 5 minutes later.

Unique visitors is mostly what I look for.  Hits is a nearly useless number.  It refers to the number of times a request is made to the web server for all things including graphics, pages, scripts, etc.  Unique visitors and page views are good numbers to look at.  Forget hits.

I also like to know where my web site traffic comes from (referrers).  Do search engines send me a lot of traffic?  Is so, which ones?  What web sites send me the most traffic?   Which of my web pages do others find most interesting? 

As I said before, tracking your referral traffic can be a good way to determine how effective your web off-site web marketing is.   If you have paid links on other sites you can get a feel for which ones work the best and how you can best spend your ad dollars in the future.   

Now Google will track your traffic at no charge.

Web site traffic tracking has gone through some interesting changes over the years. For a while, you could get really good traffic reporting at no charge from companies like Webtrends. I think it was web trends light or personal or something like that. Later you could only buy a service billed by the month or year and even later than that it seemed like the only good reporting could be had from the enterprise package for thousands of dollars. The web is littered with a lot of web site tracking sites out there that used to track hits for little or no charge. We have now come full circle.

I am talking about good web site analytics. Your traffic history can now still be available to you even if you move your web site to another host. Just embed you tracking code into your html pages and it tracks everything for you.

Google Analytics Goals- Goals allow you to track what percentage of visitors (pay-per-click) do something you want them to do once they get to your site.  If you use Adwords to attract business and send visitors to a particular page and they take a predefined action such as filling in a form, the goal is met.  Your goal might be to buy a saddle, or it might be to fill out form for more information on saddles, or watch the "Making of roping saddles" video on your site.

Google has a lot of motivation for giving away free services. By making it easy for you to increase and analyze information online, you gain more visitors.  If you use other Google services to market your goods and services such as Adwords, or make online income for your horse site with Adsense, your income goes up and so does Google's.

Let's recap the basics of getting more visitors to your site:

• Design your site well. Start with the right design/development team and technology. This will help make it much easier for people and search engines to navigate and find information on your site. It will also make it much easier to add new features and make quick changes. I cannot over emphasize choosing the right technology and team!
• Publish interesting and useful information others will want to link to.  Make sure you have good titles, web addresses (URLs), and use header tags and bolds where appropriate.  Ne sure to use keywords throughout your pages.
• Track and evaluate your traffic regularly. Start this now.   Try Google's Analytics
• Be patient. This is easier said than done :-) All changes take time to have an effect.