Where Can I Find Website Traffic Information?

By Michael David Wilson

Website traffic information is very important for many people such as publishers, advertisers, and website developers. This article describes why it is important and how you can find the traffic numbers. Publishers are always interested in the traffic that their website is getting in order to understand how it is performing and to see if those recent website changes create more traffic or less. They may also want to look at how their competitors are doing. Advertisers want to know how much traffic is going to particular websites. They want to know the reach of their running advertisements and they want to gather traffic data on a new website for a future advertising order. Website developers want to know if the websites they built are successfully receiving traffic making their clients happy.

Web Analytic Tools
If you own a website, the best way to track your traffic is using a web analytics tool. The most common free web analytic tools are Google Analytics and Yahoo Web Analytics. These tools will provide detailed statistics such as unique visitors, page views, and time on site. This data will be very valuable if you plan on selling advertising space to your potential buyers and can be used to develop a media kit. Website developers should install a web analytic tool on all websites that they build. If you are willing to spend some money and feel that the free basic tools are not giving you what you need, you may want to try a more advanced solution like WebTrends, Adobe's Omniture or IBM's Coremetrics.

Online Traffic Estimators
If you want a quick and free estimate on the amount of traffic a website is getting, visit any of the popular ones briefly described directly below. These sites are great if you want to spy on your competition or as an advertiser, want to confirm the data provided by a publisher.

Alexa provides an estimate on the percentage of Internet users that may have visited a website during a certain period of time. It works better for websites with high traffic. The estimator can be used to understand traffic trends as well. Furthermore, Alexa supplies audience demographic data such as age and education level.

Compete displays an estimated amount of unique visitors in the U.S. Data is gathered using ISP data, internal tools, and other data sources to provide a fairly accurate estimate of traffic statistics. Again, if the website has a low amount of traffic, only a very rough estimate is provided and in some cases, there is no data available. Compete allows you to export the report into different formats if you wish to analyze or share it.

Quantcast is another traffic estimator which provides a rough estimate of traffic in the U.S. In terms of demographics in the U.S., the site displays data on gender, age, race, education level, whether the visitor has children, and income level. These statistics are again just estimates. Interestingly, the site also offers data on traffic frequency (i.e. regular visitor vs passer-by).

Data Aggregators gather information from multiple sources such as Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, Google, Yahoo and other data sources to provide a comprehensive report. For example, MyDomainStats displays different traffic estimates, a graphical snapshot of the homepage, backlink statistics, Google page rank, and even an estimated monetary value. You can click on the individual data points to go to the particular site of interest if you want more in-depth information from that specific site. These tools are great if you want data from multiple sources as it saves you the effort from visiting each one individually.

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E-Zines - Where The Traffic Is!

Do you know what an e-zine is? To answer that question an e-zine is an online magazine that is specifically related to a niche/market, and are generally building huge lists with targeted subscribers. The advantage to e-zine marketing is amazing; it needs to part of your traffic generating methods.

When marketing to a huge audience as targeted as e-zine traffic you will gain a big boost in traffic and authoritativeness in your niche. How are you going to drive traffic from e-zines? There are only 2 ways to drive traffic from e-zines paid or free. There is always a free way to get traffic you just need to know how. Let us begin with the free traffic generation form e-zines.

Free E-zine Traffic

There is one way and only one way to leverage traffic from e-zines for free. The way to do this is with article writing Remember you are writing an article for an online magazine, which most of these do have offline magazines as well. You really want to keep all your articles original for each e-zine you are submitting too. Make sure you have done your research for the subject of your article, and give their subscribers quality content.

When I say subscribers this means with e-zines they will generally send your article out to their subscribers on their list. Remember when I said e-zines build huge lists, this is where we can drive traffic without owning your own list. When you write a good quality article and the e-zine approves it the traffic you can potentially get from your article is astonishing.

Do not let this scare you article writing is not that hard and can be done, and you don't have to be a pro in your niche. All you have to do is write something that gives the e-zines subscribers something of relevancy and stands out from the pack a bit.

Be strong with your writing, and make sure to stay focused. Don't get caught up with using big words and trying to know more than you do. Be precise and gain attention to the subscribers and the e-zine owner.

E-zine Marketing Paid

The easiest way to get your message sent out to an e-zine list is to pay for advertising in their current newsletter. This can come in the form of solo ads, classified ads, and banner ads.

Solo Ads

Solo ads are just that, an email sent out to an e-zines list that is all about you and your message, back linking to your site. A solo ad can really generate some good quality targeted traffic to your site. Usually there will be guidelines to how long and how many characters can be used in your solo ad. This is up to the e-zine as well as price. I have seen solo ads as low as $50 and as high as $4000, so it can be done if your budget is low.

You can leverage a solo ad buy sending that traffic to a squeeze page building your list, a review page of a particular product in the niche you are in, or a sales page of your own product or someone else's.

The traffic from a solo ad is already targeting and the chance of a new visitor to your site taking action is much greater then general advertising. See what solo ads can do for you.

Classified Ads And Banner Ads

Classified's and Banners fall in the same category. Your ad will be placed inside the e-zines newsletter in a specific location and ad cost depends on location. With classifieds you are writing good text ads in order to generate a click, and with banners you are creating an image to capture clicks.

You will usually pay for 1 to 5 issues of the newsletter for which your ad will be displayed. Some e-zines will let you pay cost per impression, but for the most part it will be per issue.

classifieds and banners are generally much cheaper than solo ads, but do take testing and time and can add up. They are affective and do work, but if you are looking to get the traffic you are looking for I highly suggest solo ads.

Conclusion

If you want to take this on alone you will have to first find the e-zines you want to submit articles to if they take them, and work out advertising with them personally. You are going to want to make sure they are not going to scam you and just take your money as well. I know it sucks, but there are people out there that do this. I hope this article was informing, and can help you with you internet marketing career.

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