PEAPOD Logistics: Tracking blog visits
So, you've got a blog, and you want to know how to track your visitors and traffic?
How can you tell how often people visit your pages?
Simple - create a tracker css file on a server of your choosing, and then reference it in the code of your blog.
You'll need:
1. An "empty" .css file (one which has only comments like /* */ in it -- don't use an empty file -- some browsers freak out with completely blank .css files) to include in your blog with a stylesheet reference.
2. Stats from the hosting website that tell you how often that css file is served on your blog pages.
Do the following:
1. Create an "empty" css file, a nearly empty text file which has only a comment (like /* */) in it. Important: don't use a completely empty file -- some browsers freak out with completely blank .css files. In my case, I have a .css file that I've named fuel_blog_tracker.css, that I'm going to reference in my Fuel blog. Each month (or each day, if I'm really curious), I'll check to see how many times that .css was served by my server. My website stats will show it.
2. Upload the css file to a server that collects stats. If you don't already have one, you can sign up with Omnis for a scant $6.95/month for 1Gig of storage and 100Gig throughput each month -- they rock! Make sure you upload your css file in ascii format. (You probably already know this, but it can't hurt to say it again.)
3. Include that css file in your blog template code with a stylesheet reference.
For example, since I've got my fuel_blog_tracker.css file in the /tracking/ directory on my site sitebasics.net, I'm putting the following reference in my Blogger template code:
<LINK REL="STYLESHEET" TYPE="text/css" HREF="http://www.sitebasics.net/tracking/fuel_blog_tracker.css">
Because it's a css file, I put it in the usual css location -- between the <head> tags at the very top of the code.
Note: Make sure you test the full path to your css file (including the http://) in your browser, so you don't get a "not found" page. If you get a "not found" page, you'll need to fix your url.
From that point on, starting the next day (since stats are often updated overnight), you can go to the stats page of your web host and check the number of times your tracker css file has been served (i.e., the css file will only be referenced if it's been displayed by someone). Granted, this is not an exact science, since search engines can crawl your blog and "pull" the css file, and if you put your css file in the main template, it will be displayed every time a page on your blog is viewed, which doesn't give you "granularity" in identifying how often your particular pages are looked at.
If you need to track individual page views, you can create distinct tracker css files for each of your posts and place them in the text of your individual posts, along with the rest of the content. Then you'll be able to track exactly how many times such-and-such a post was viewed.
In any case, this you method lets you get some idea about how often your blog is being visited. And that can be a very encouraging thing.
posted by Kay Stoner @ 9:08 AM
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