With the right tools, you can know a lot more than just where your site traffic is coming from. For example, you can learn the kind of browser used, their screen resolution, which site page they looked at first, how long they stayed on your site, which pages were the most popular, and much, much more.

These and other statistics about your site visitors are important because they tell you how your visitors found you, how your site looks to them, their behavior when there, and what they liked, disliked, and perhaps didn't even find. All of which is important information for fine-tuning your Web site marketing for maximum bottom-line results. There are two primary ways you can compile statistics about your site visitors�

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There is another way to track how visitors use your Web site and this trick doesn't cost you a cent!  For this to work you need two things to be in place:

1. Your domain name is used within your e-mail address.  For example: your primary e-mail account would look something like "jane@yourdomain.com" (where "yourdomain.com" would be substituted for your actual domain name);

2. Your e-mail service allows the use of "wildcard" aliases.  That is, e-mail sent to any valid user name in conjunction with your domain name will automatically go to your primary e-mail address account.  For example: mail sent to "123anything@yourdomain.com" will arrive at the "jane@yourdomain.com" account (most ISP automatically allow this).

Now assuming you give your visitors an opportunity to e-mail you with questions or comments from every page of your site (which you should!), you can set up your "tracking" in the following way:

For each separate section (or even page) of your site, use a different alias which visitors can e-mail to.  For example, in your new listings sections you can use "newlistings@yourdomain.com", in the Buyer Tips section "buyertips@yourdomain.com" and so on.  All the e-mail will be routed to your primary address so you won't miss anything.  However, now you will know exactly which part of your site compelled them to contact you --which is very useful marketing information (if gives you a first hand idea as to what is moving them to action).

You can even get fancy by setting up special Rules and Folders in your Outlook e-mail program that will automatically process the incoming mail by a) alerting you that mail has arrived addressed using a specific alias; and b) automatically place the message into the appropriate "folder" within your e-mail software (see the October 2001 "Ask Mr. Internet" article for further information on this).

Tracking the "who, what, why, when, and where" of your visitors is one thing, determining which part of your site compelled them to contact you is even better especially when it doesn't cost you anything!