Electronics is an industry full of numbers. MRP Reports, Market Share, raw material costs, profits, QA reports, POA reports, design wins, registrations and much much more. The amount of numbers would make any Math lover crazy. As someone looking at their company website, you need to embrace the love of statistics. It will benefit you. Now it’s true many people have some form of Hit Counter or Visitor Log, do you or anyone else actually use it? And what are you using? If the answer is no and nothing. You’re in trouble. You missing some important information.

Now the reason you might not be using the info is you could be using something that measures page views or hits and nothing more and its not worth sharing. Maybe you even track where your visitors are coming from which is great info, but if that’s it you are missing out. There is so much more info you can retrieve form your visiting customers, that can quickly help you form a portrait. And if the portrait is wrong, you can fix it, modify it or redirect it to what your website and brand is actually trying to achieve.

We will cover some of the best FREE scripts, websites and programs to get the info you need to run your business properly. The ease of implementing most of these scripts is as simple as just adding some simple code to your web page. You should notify your visitor as well they are being tracked via the privacy policy, which is common courtesy. Just as we do here.

So on with the show. Here are our picks of some of the best (and easy) tools you can use to start getting more info on your visitors and help your company place themselves properly:

Statcounter is one of the most popular (and did we mention free) hit counters on the web. It can track your users invisibly, and provide you with a range of details. The following: Popular Pages,Entry Pages,Exit Pages, Came From, Keyword Analysis,Recent Keyword Activity, Recent Came From, Search Engine Wars,Visitor Paths, Visit Length, Returning Visits, Recent Pageload Activity, Recent Visitor Activity, Recent Visitor Map, and much more. The only limit on the free account is that each project has a log size of 500. For a small monthly fee you can increase the log size.

Google Analytics is another tool that is free for users. It should come as now surprise that Google is  one of the big players in this sphere. There offering allows for many graphical representations of the inforamtion and can help track a site base don Goals, such as covertsion rates and more.

Qunatsats takes things to a new level reading information on visitors and including demorgraphic info. Unlike the other two above, this info is pubilicy available even if you do not sign up for it, or include your site in their searches. The benfit of joing is getting a more accurate profile of your visitors. Check out your website and get ready for the surprise on the aount of demographoic info they are able to obtain.

Omniture is not a free service, but is widelt used by many Fortune 500 companies.

The above are all great choices for third party scripts, but we do know you might have limitations at work. There are two choices when your company decides to keep evertyhing in house, but you still need or want the info. One way is hosting the stat software on your own server, the second is third party websites where info is publicly available to you.

First let’s examine the scripts you could host on your site. This is the best way to keep the information you have in house. The best one we found was phpMyVisites. PhpMyVisites is a free and powerful open source (GNU/GPL) software for websites statistics and audience measurements. It provides lots of information on websites visitors, visited pages, software/hardware utilization and much much more. No need for third parties!

Now if hosting on your server is not possible, the simplest way to get info is third party websites. These will still give you a lot of great information. It’s also a good idea to check these as well, even if you use other solutions, just to know what others see publicly. The two we suggest you check out are:

Compete allows marketers and webmasters to stay on top of rivals with site metrics and audience profiles for the top 1,000,000 web domains.

Alexa based on widely deployed Alexa Toolbar, Alexa has built a database of information about sites that includes statistics, related links and more. All of this information can be found on Alexa’s Site Overview pages, Traffic Detail pages and Related Links pages. To access these pages, simply type the URL of any site into the Alexa Search box.

The end result is clear. Your website should look at some way of tracking users. It’s one of the key ways to ensure your message is getting out to the right audience, and that your content is directed properly in the search engines.