Tracking is Important and Downright Fun

As you improve your site, you might ask, "How do I know that my effort is bringing more people to my site?" One way to do that is to track your traffic. It's good to start tracking as soon as you can so that you can see how much your site improves over time. Plus, isn't it fun to see how many hits your site gets a day?

There are two ways to track traffic on Wetpaint:

Site Meter
To set-up site stats tracking you need to simply sign-up with SiteMeter (it's free), get a tracking code, and paste it into your 'Site Statistics' area in your site's 'Settings' section. A perk with Sitemeter is that Sitemeter will send you a report and let you see how many visits your site gets and how many pages people view once they are there. Pretty cool, huh? For details and a demonstration of how it works, go to Site Meter.


Google Analytics -- An Advanced Way to Track
Along with Site Meter, you can use Google Analytics to track your site's performance. If you sign up for a free Google Analytics account, and you'll be able to track visits, page views, and what terms people are typing into the search engines to find your site. This tool is more advanced, but if you want to learn all about your site's performance, this is an option. Though Wetpaint doesn't offer support for learning how to use this tool, you can learn to use it through the tool itself.