After picking up a google analytics tool for my phone, I have been regularly watching the traffic statistics of my websites. What I was seeing was quite a marked increase in traffic, way more than I had been seeing in the last couple of years. Which was matching an increase in hacking attempts and comment spamming. Now I have to approve every comment before they go up on the site, as I really don’t want to have a site full of rubbish comments. After the last upgrade I had a good look at the security of my sites and saw an increase of attempted entry via the login screen. Adding a few extra security features and blocking repeat attempts has seen my overall traffic drop, but I am now finding that the drop in traffic matches the amount of comment spam and access attempts that I have now blocked using the originating IP address.

Of course search bots and comment spammers are going to still be hitting my site, but by blocking their IP will hopefully knock down the stuff I have to deal with in the backend of the website.

If I had not been monitoring the site regularly from the convenience of my phone, I might have been really surprised by the drops in traffic when I did go to check the statistics.

The other bonus is that you can quickly see your most visited pages and what is popular on the site, along with which pages are bleeding traffic. Now there are always a few ways to deal with this, by offering alternate links on each of the bleeding pages to try and keep some of the traffic longer, or to give a much greater focus to the pages that are getting the traffic and building on the content offered on those pages. Maybe even adding an extra call to action or link to your store to try and convert the traffic to a customer.

The fact that google analytics is free and you can get applications for your phone that can hook into your account means it is easy to check the stats whilst waiting for your morning coffee. Better yet, you can check your clients sites for them and help them plan to take advantage of anything you see happening with the traffic trends on their site.

Do you have a particular app or system in place for monitoring traffic? I was very much a webstats type of guy seeing the data pushed into a simple graph from the server, but after seeing analytics hooked up with a phone I was totally sold! So any tips you can share about the best app or system you use would be great, as I am always looking for ways to enhance my productivity and the offerings I bring to my clients.