Once your proxy site is up and running, you’ll want to know a little about your traffic. Adsense (or any other advert provider) will give you some information. However, this is limited to your earnings, the number of impressions and your click through rate. In order to increase your earnings and optimize your proxy, you really want to know a bit more than that.

There are several ways to monitor your traffic, but really proxy owners should skip straight to Goggle Analytics. There are problems with the way that some other programmes report proxy traffic. For example, Awstats (automatically available with most hosts through Cpanel) tends to overstate the number of unique visitors due to the way that proxy scripts work. Google Analytics offers everything that a proxy webmaster should need, and it can be integrated with Adsense to offer you extra insight into your revenue. It’s completely free, and is fairly straightforward to use.

We’re not going to offer a complete overview of Analytics here. The best thing to do is to get it installed, and have a play with the stats. Google Analytics will tell you all the normal stats: visitors, page views, time on site etc. Obviously your aim is to increase the number of visitors and there is no better way to achieve your aims than by setting targets within Analytics.

There are a few particularly important areas for proxy webmasters to have a look at. Take a look at your traffic sources. You might be surprised by the breakdown of traffic, and this can drastically affect the way that you promote your proxy. You need to know where your traffic is coming from so that you know what works, and how to spend your future time (or money). For example, if you’ve spent all your time doing SEO, but are hardly getting any search engine traffic then you may need to reconsider your keywords. Likewise, if you’ve spent money on paid promotion on a proxy top site, you’ll want to know that the money translates into traffic!