Reading an article today in Media Buyer Planner regarding the latest flap in online marketing and advertising, it became clear that not everyone can determine the traffic success of a website or blog. Even the experts have difficulty determining what stats and traffic a site has and the numbers behind them.

I use a number of stats packages and try to blend the results as I can. There are many companies offering a stats software package, and none of them seem to agree on one method and none of the numbers seem to equal the other. This is probably not a problem for the likes of business blogs that are not talking about millions of page views a month, but for the media buyers out there it is big business. Paying for eyeballs is what it’s all about.

How do you measure the traffic of your blog and what is the significance? These are some very often asked questions of clients wanting to know if their efforts are worth their time and money. They want to know what the return is for their investment.

Here are some of the packages available to businesses that can help them see what the numbers are and packages that provide invaluable metrics to blog publishers.

Google Analytics

StatCounter

Performancing Blog Metrics

Sitemeter

Mint

My Blog Log

Measure Map

This list is certainly not a a list of the entire realm of packages, but it is some of the more popular software packages available.

Tracking your blogs performance is important from a business standpoint because you can find out who is talking about you, find out who is visiting, how many are visiting and many other worthwile metrics that can help you with determining your blog’s success.

What makes a blog a success? Once you have hit your goals for what you are trying to accomplish with the blog, you will know. Stats are important to track, but they don’t make a blog a success or failure. That measurement can only be established by the publisher. My advice is to set out your goals and follow your stats.