Important ways to use traffic reporting plugin is to use the Live Visitor Tracking feature of ExtraWatch extension. Live Visitor Counter actually serves you the key information in real time. You'll see who’s browsing your site at the moment – as well as all the information about your users’ vital statistics and most important behaviors as they browse your site. Main Real Time Live Visitor Tracking Overview Dashboard seems large and complicated at first, you might be a little intimidated to use all of the information right away. live-visitor-tracking

Live Visitor Counter view with real time visits tracking

This includes information like where your user is from (flag icons), which site the user came from, and which google search keywords they used to find you. Each listing gives you an overview of the user’s basic behavior – the top lists the most recent visitors. (Note: visitors for your site will update themselves as you use the Live Visitor Counter, such new visit is highlighted with yellow color) Dashboard will give you more options or information if you click on individual visit. Clicking on the globe icon on the far left next to a user’s information will open a map that shows the user’s approximate location on Google Maps. visitor-location Scrolling down, you’ll see older and older visits. If this seems like a difficult concept to comprehend at first, remember that just about everything you see on the tracking dashboard is clickable or hoverable – you can get more information as you explore its different features, thus allowing you to get a comprehensive look at your live traffic statistics to unprecedented levels. Below, you can see a zoom-in of the traffic statistics available to you on the left-hand side of the screen: If you’re paying close attention, you’re seeing that there’s a listing that looks like a clicking hand along with a number on the right side of each visit’s information. That’s because you’re seeing correctly – these numbers represent a very informative statistic for you how many times a user clicked when on a particular page. These clicks you are then able to see in click heat map. Using the main tracking dashboard on the left side, you’ll also be able to view where your site has been showing up in Google searches. Needless to say, this can be a very handy and quick way of viewing your site’s overall performance in search engines. One way to do this is to hover over the description of the visit, whereupon you’ll see the following box appear:

URL and Form values

This box gives you a number of options: first, you can choose to block a specific IP address from your website. This one feature alone will help you to specifically weed out users, spammers, or individual bots that you don’t find conducive to building a good website. Additionally, you can view the URL parameters of each visitors, and you can use each URL parameter as a goal if you so choose, helping you to customize and build upon the style of traffic that you’d like to see out of your audience in the future. Because this parameter is customizable, you can add a complete page as a goal, which means you can set a shopping cart page as a goal in order to track your conversion rates. This will additionally help you to measure your traffic flow and conversion rates when combined with other features like the heat map and traffic flow features. You don’t have to use goals at first if you’re still getting the hang of using Joomla, but as you get used to the idea of tracking visitor conversions to certain sub-sites like feedback forms and shopping cart pages, you’ll probably end up using this feature perhaps more than any of the other features present in Live Visitor Counter. If a user that you’re hovering over also submitted some kind of form or performed a similar action at your site, you’ll also be able to view that at this point. It will simply indicate whether or not a user who arrived at your site eventually submitted a form. Below the Main List A quick note about what you see below the main list on the left side of the dashboard: your live traffic statistics based not on actual visitors, but by the bots who visited your site. You can view what this looks like below: As you see, many of the main features for tracking your visitors are still present – IP address, individual navigation statistics, etc. – but the key here is that you can also block these IP addresses in order to ensure that you are capable of repelling spam bots. For example, a spam bot that collects information on your email addresses is not something that you want on your website – that’s a great reason to use Live Visitor Counter in and of itself. If you want to unblock certain IP addresses from your blocked list, you’ll be able to do that in a similar area on the right hand of the screen. In both cases, you’ll get an easy-to-view summary of blocked IP addresses that allows you to manage your site’s privacy easily. So far, this has all been about the left side of the main Live Visitor Tracking dashboard. But there’s just as much information to be found over on the right-hand side of the dashboard. Exploring What’s on the Right One of the beautiful things about visitor dashboard is that it allows you to view so much information using the same basic dashboard – you’ll be able to pull up just about all the information you want by exploring the different sides of the screen. At first glance, you’ll get true dashboard – including the history of the traffic your site has been pulling throughout the day. But you can customize these stats and features to view statistics well into the past –indeed, at some points, you can quickly view all of your comprehensive statistics since you began recording your traffic. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the top section located over on the right-hand side of the Live Visitor Tracking dashboard:

Blocking user, adding page as goal

As you can see, one of the most prominent visible features is that of the “Last Visit Map,” which uses an icon to display the approximate location of your most recent visitor. You can change where this map is located and zoom out if you’re curious about more of your recent visitors and how your site has been performing across different locations. The essential statistics shown here are unique visits, page loads, and overall hits. Dashboard breaks each of these down by day. In the charts above, you can see that the blue bars showed how many unique hits you had, while the green bar displays how many pages they viewed. The number to the right of the blue bars displays a ratio of unique visitors to pages viewed, thus giving you a quick overall idea of how many pages each of your visitors are viewing your site. Another great feature is that you aren’t limited to viewing only the previous week – you can view different weeks easily by looking at the past (from the moment you started tracking your statistics with Joomla). Further down the right-hand side of the dashboard, you’ll see this:

Block SPAM and entire IP “wildcard”

Keep in mind that you can also block entire IP “wildcard” numbers from your site if you keep receiving visits from a particular spammer. This helps give you even more control over who’s viewing your Joomla site without any inconvenience at all. Simply click “enter IP manually” for more options on blocking specific types of numbers from access to your website. visitor-blocking In addition to all of the live and daily stats that you see on your dashboard, you can easily change what you see on the right hand side of the dashboard by selecting a different setting: for example, you can see your all-time traffic statistics. This is a great way to run an “instant report” without having to download any new PDF file or new Word document. The beauty of Live Visitor Tracking is that it dos a lot to demonstrate to you exactly what’s going on with your site all in one page. You can certainly integrate it with other Joomla or Wordpress or even Magento features to get an even more comprehensive view of your site and how well it’s directing its users to the right spots. But it all starts with your knowledge and usage of the dashboard.