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If you are a website owner, one of your biggest headaches would be to drive traffic to your website. When you adopt new strategies and implement new plans to improve the flow and quality of traffic to your site, then it is naturally very important that you have some reliable method to gauge that change. It is important to know the number of visitors, how long they spend on your site, how long they spend on specific sections of your site, and where they click, and so on. For all this, and much more, traffic tools are available that can really make this job much easier. However, for the beginner, choosing a tool can be a daunting task indeed, owing to the profusion of tools out there. Here is a brief guide to the major types of traffic tools that can help you monitor your site traffic.

Traffic Tools

Major Types of Traffic Tools:

Blog Analysis Tools:
These are excellent if you wish you monitor the traffic to your blog and also see what people do when they visit. You can see the popular searches, top referrers, and popularity. Some of these software measure the popularity of your blog by counting the number of people who have marked it among their “favorites”. Here are some of the blog analysis software you can go for:

o MeasureMap
o Mint
o Technorati

Site Comparison:

These are the ideal traffic tools to use if you wish to compare the traffic on your site with other sites such as your competitors’. Here are some brands you can use:

o Compete
o Alexa
o Hitwise

Analytics Software Packages:

The best thing about analytics software packages is that they pack a great deal of functionality into one integrated package, and give you an exhaustive overview of exactly who visits your site, when, and for how long, and exactly what they do there. This can give you a great idea of specifically which areas of your site to improve. Here are some of the most reliable of these:

o Google Analytics (Free to use)
o Site Meter
o WebTrends

The selection of tools mentioned here is only the tip of the iceberg as far as traffic tools for monitoring are concerned; there are hundreds more that are available and you can choose one according to the specific requirements of your business.