Web Traffic Analysis & Statistics

Web Traffic Statistics - Hits, Visitors, Pageviews

Most companies that have websites have access to traffic statistics, usually provided by their web host. Those that don't look at these files (or use a bargain basement web hosting company that doesn't provide them) don't know what they are missing- there is a wealth of information to be found, and reacting to this information can have a positive impact on a company's bottom line. What follows are some of the most basic stats that are typically available, followed by brief suggestions on how to use the information.

The Myth of "Hits" Most web surfers have come across sites that boast about "20,000 hits per day" or something similar. But what does this mean? To an internet marketer, unfortunately, not much. "Hits" actually refers to the number of requests for information the web server receives. To use an oversimplified example, if your company homepage has 20 separate graphics on it, each visitor to that page will account for 20 hits. If you were boasting of 20,000 hits per day, you would really only be talking about 1000 visitors. Obviously, this statistic is not a fair indication of actual site visitors, and shouldn't be figured into your traffic analysis.

Average Visitors (Daily, Weekly, Monthly) This is the true measure of website activity. Of course, more traffic is desirable in most circumstances (provided it is at least somewhat targeted). Without access to this data and the ability to look at visitor history, it is impossible to tell if your traffic building initiatives, whether online or offline, are working. It should be noted that the more your traffic increases, the more accurate the rest of your data becomes. This is simply because trends in a larger sample are more telling than trends in a smaller sample where a small number of atypical users can skew the results.

Average Time Spent On Site and Average Page Views Per Visitor This data can be very useful in determining how your site is connecting with visitors. If the average time that people spend on the site is small (for example less than a minute), or the average visitor only visits one or two pages, it may indicate some sort of problem. Perhaps your site is attracting the wrong traffic, with visitors abandoning the site quickly when they realize it isn't what they were seeking. Perhaps visitors are confused by the navigation and decide to look elsewhere. Maybe your site, even though you love it, gives off an inexplicable bad vibe. Whatever the case, an awareness of the time people spend on your site and the number of pages they view can bring a potential problem to your attention, and help you gauge how effective your solution is.

Most/Least Requested Pages This information is helpful in determining the "hot" and "cold" areas of your website. If you notice that a page that you think is important is not getting any attention, perhaps the link to this page should be made more prominent or enticing. On the other hand, if there are areas of the site that you deem less important that are attracting a great deal of your traffic, you can shift some of your sales/marketing focus to those pages. Whatever you find in these stats, you can bet that it will give you valuable insight into the interests and motivations of your visitors.

Top Exit Pages There are probably certain pages of your site where you don't mind visitors leaving (after all, they can't stay forever). A confirmation page after they fill out a request for more information might be one example of a reasonable exit point. A contact page that tells visitors how to get in touch with your company might also be acceptable. Unfortunately, it is unrealistic to assume that each of your visitors is going to find exactly what they are looking for on your company site, so it is normal to see a wide range of exit pages. However, if a high percentage of visitors are leaving on any particular page, it bears some close scrutiny. Sometimes minor modifications in content can have a positive impact on visitor retention.

Top Search Phrases This data can be very useful in understanding what type of traffic is coming to your site. If you see relevant phrases that bring you consistent traffic, you can assume that you are getting some targeted traffic. On the other hand, if there are predominant phrases people are using to find your site that are unrelated to your business, you know that at least some of your traffic is of a lesser quality. In addition, if you notice that people find your site by typing in the name of your company, you should be pleased to know that you have achieved some level of brand awareness. By examining the search phrases that your visitors are using, you gain a better understanding of your visitor.

Conclusion Some people are intimidated by these reports (mostly because of the sheer volume of data available), but they shouldn't be. While there are many highly specialized statistics that can be used for more in-depth analysis of site traffic, the above areas alone can provide invaluable information on site visitors and website performance. Remember- this data is available for a reason. It's up to your company to use it!

Free Web Statistics and Web Log Analyzers

Web log analysers (or "log analyzers" if you use American English) allow you to generate useful statistics about your website and your visitors from your raw web logs. Typically, they will present the web statistics in a graphical or tabular form - organising related data together to make it easier to get a picture of your site's performance. For example, you can use the statistics to understand how your visitors arrive at your site: which search engine sent them? Which keywords did they use to search? What browsers did they use? Or the generated report can be used to examine the traffic flow through your site - which are the entry pages? Which are your exit pages? It allows the web designer or webmaster the opportunity to fix problems with his/her site and understand the target audience. In my opinion, if you have access to raw logs (as most, if not all, commercial web hosts provide), web log analysers and statistics programs are far more useful than web counter Perl CGI scripts and the like .

Disclaimer

The information provided on this page comes without any warranty whatsoever. Use it at your own risk. Just because a program, book or service is listed here or has a good review does not mean that I endorse or approve of the program or of any of its contents. All the other standard disclaimers also apply.

Free Web Statistics and Web Log Analyzers

Logrep analyses and presents the data obtained from your various logs (including web logs, mail logs, event logs, intrusion logs, syslog files, etc) and generates statistics for your system. The reports are generated in an HTML page. The program supports Apache, Snort, Squid, Postfix, Sendmail, syslog, ipchains, iptables, NT event logs, Firewall-1, wtmp, xferlog, Oracle listener and Pix. It uses a client/server model (with secure SSH communication between client and server) and works under Linux and Windows. The source is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

AWStats is a web server log analyzer that generates graphical statistics from your web logs. It can be run as a CGI script or from the command line to create the web stats. It has a large number of features, including the ability to count unique visitors, most popular page, domains/countries of visitors, rush hours, browsers, operating system used, robot visits, search engines, keywords used in search engines, HTTP errors (eg 404 File Not Found errors ), etc. It can analyse Apache native combined log files, IIS log files, WebStar native log files, and personalised log formats. The program is actually a Perl script, and perhaps because of this, is rather slow. You can use this offline on your logs (such as on your own computer); it does not need to be run on your web server. If not for its speed (or lack thereof), I actually like this web stats software.

The free version of this log analyzer is for non-commercial (private/educational) use only, and lags behind the commercial version by a few versions. Binaries are available for Irix, Solaris, Linux, System V 4.0 (i386), and Windows NT. It has numerous features and is installed by a number of commercial web hosts . I find that it is good for collating information, but lacks sufficient analysis of that information. For example, it will give you the list of all 404 errors. But it does not tell you the referring page that generated those 404 errors. (Okay, I know. Few, if any, log analyzers at the time of this writing do this anyway.)

This is a popular free log analyser that is used on a number of web hosts, both free and commercial (probably because it's free). It appears to lack the facility to generate exhaustive reports like one of the other log analyzers listed on this page, but if you only want to take a look at say, the "top 30" (or whatever) of all the sites that referred visitors to your site, and not all of them, you'll be fine.

Written in C, this web log analyzer purports to be fast. Because it is integrated in a popular "control panel" used by many web hosts, it can be found on a number of commercial web hosts . Being free, it is also used by some free web hosts . It is popular with a number of people (I am not one of them) and provides a wide variety of reports. It appears to lack the facility to generate exhaustive reports like one of the other log analyzers listed on this page, but if you only want to take a look at say, the "top 250" (or whatever) of all the sites that referred visitors to your site, and not all of them, you'll be fine.

Measure Web Traffic Analysis Statistics

So, who's been visiting your website lately? What do you mean you don't know? How can you tell what's working if you don't have some sort of tracking in place? Measuring website traffic, also known as "stats," is how you know who's visiting your site, where they're coming from, how long they stay, entry and exit pages and more.

You need this information to make informed decisions about your site. You can use it to understand your guests' buying patterns and to measure the effectiveness of your marketing and promotional strategies. It can also be used to show you which areas of your site are the most popular and the pages no one seems to visit. You can use this information to redesign your site and play-up the popular pages while eliminating the ones no one views.

So how do you get this valuable information? There are a number of ways to collect stats on your website. You can:

1. Purchase Software
2. Use a Free Online Service
3. Use a Paid Online Service/ Third Party Auditors
4. Use your own Web Host

Let's take each option one by one. First in the group of choices is buying stats software. The problem with this option is the hefty price tag. Most of the good ones don't come cheap.

Webtrends.com - http://www.webtrends.com

The leader in stats software, they offer a variety of solutions for everyone from the small business owner to large corporations. Prepare to shell out some big bucks depending on your needs. Visit the site and download a trial copy.

Websitereporter.com - http://www.websitereporter.com

Professional website stats software with many options. Website Reporter 3.0 offers a free demo and runs on Unix or NT and only costs between 50 to 75.00. Tracks total hits, maximum hits and date, report traffic, top entry and exit pages and much more.

At only 99.00, this one is in everyone's price range. Tells you who's visiting your site and does it very quickly. Includes a hyperlinked tree view report that graphically shows how visitors are moving through your site. Runs only on Win 95,98, or NT, but can analyze log files generated by Unix servers.

Openwebscope.com - http://www.openwebscope.com

Free to download and 69.00 to register. Easy to read charts and graphs tell you in an instant what visitors are doing on your site. View sample reports at the site to get a feel for what the software can do.

Now let's take a look at your options when it comes to free stats. Many sites offer free stats in exchange for placing a small banner or button on your pages. Many of them are really good if you don't mind the small graphic.

Freestats.com - http://www.freestats.com Free Stats is free and easy to use. The downfall is the code they give you inserts a banner on the pages you wish to track. They do offer a "gold" service that eliminates the banners for only 5.95 a month.

Thecounter.com - http://www.thecounter.com

The Counter supplies in-depth traffic reports. Tracks the number of visitors, referrers, browsers, and more. Simple to use add a few lines of HTML to your pages and you're good to go.

Stattrack.com - http://www.stattrack.com

Stat Track is more then just a counter; you get detailed information about your web guests. To use it you will have to tolerate a small 88X31 button on your tracked pages. Sign up, paste the code and you're done.

Now, let's move on to third party or pay stats services. Third party means another server collects and tabulates your website traffic, not the server your site is hosted on.

Professional SuperStats- http://v2.superstats.com/service_options.html

Offers advanced real time tracking and historical reporting on site traffic. Not software, it's easy to set up. The tracking code is invisible to your site visitors, no banners or buttons. You can also export the data to MS Word, Excel or PDF format for further analyzing. Only 19.95 per month or 200.00 US dollars for the year.

Site Gauge - http://www.sitegauge.com/reports.htm

Offering a free service, but you have to show banners on your site. For only 19.95 a month for up to 20,000 page views I'd go with the Pro service. It's invisible on your site and the stats collected are really in-depth. You can also request that the stats be e-mailed to you daily.

The last and final option is your web host. Some web hosts will be able to supply you with stats but not all of them. You'll have to ask yours if they do and if there is any charge involved. Usually they supply you with this information for free as an add-on to you hosting service, but I have seen some that charge a small fee for access. Make a point to ask, as many of them won't point it out to you otherwise.

There you have it, stats in a nut shell. By analyzing your website statistics you'll be able to make more informed decisions and know what's working and who's visiting your site. The breadcrumbs are there.... do you have a system in place to find them?

Take the Guesswork out of Web Site Analysis

ZY Computing has released 123LogAnalyzer v. 3.0, an easy-to-use multi-platform tool that turns your web logs into a comprehensive analysis of your customers and prospects. 123LogAnalyzer tells you how visitors browse your web site, which pages they view and which they ignore, how long they spend on your site, and where they come from. With its new Marketing Report, you can track, analyze, and measure results by marketing campaign; 123LogAnalyzer keeps track of costs, sales, and profits by visitors, by bandwidth, and by page views and downloads.

123LogAnalyzer's web server activity report displays the number of visitors, the number of unique IP addresses, the amount of bandwidth used, and the number of hits the site received, broken down by time increment, day of the week, and hour of the day. To learn more about the information that visitors accessed, you can see which web pages were viewed, files were downloaded, directories were accessed, and images were looked at.

Referrer information includes the domains and URL's that the visitors came from. In addition to tracking visitors by country, the program's new Geographic Reports let you track visitors by state and by major US city.

The search engine performance report displays the search engines which referred visitors to the site, and the words and phrases that visitors searched for. It's easy to determine which search engines you've optimized your web site for, and which search engines require more work. In addition, 123LogAnalyzer provides information about which platforms and browsers people are using to visit your site. You can even identify missing files, broken links, and other errors that visitors encountered.

With its advanced filter options, 123LogAnalyzer lets you examine only those visitors who went to specific pages, or who downloaded particular files. You can also zero in on visitors who came from particular URL's, specific countries, or who visited at certain hours of the day.

123LogAnalyzer's power lies in its ability to perform deep datamining. You can easily create and combine filters to extract specific information. For example, not only can you see how many visitors visited the "Buy Now" page, but you can also see what other pages these people viewed, what their browsing sequence was, how many files they downloaded, what domain they came from, and what search engine keywords they used to get to your web site. Armed with this information, your can fine-tune your web site to be a more effective sales machine.

New features in v. 3.0 include Marketing Reports that let you track visitors by marketing campaign, Geographic Reports that let you track visitors by US city and state, a log file exporting feature that lets you trim unnecessary data before you perform your analysis (for example, "hits" on JPG and GIF files), the ability to track authenticated visitors, support for additional search engines, and enhanced command-line execution options.

123LogAnalyzer runs on Windows 95/98/Me/NT4/2000/XP PC, Linux, Mac OSX, Free BSD, and Sun Solaris platforms. Its intuitive interface requires no technical knowledge. The program supports and auto-detects major web server log files in all popular formats.

The program produces reports in real-time. On a 800Mhz PIII computer running Windows 2000, it can analyze 94,000 lines of log file data per second, or a little over 1GB of data per minute.

In the short term, 123LogAnalyzer pinpoints new opportunities to attract more visitors and customers by telling you which of your web pages are working and which aren't. In the long term, the program lets you understand shifts in visitors' browsing and buying behavior, and gives you the information you need to give your web site a sales tune-up.

123LogAnalyzer v. 3.0 costs $129.95(US), comes with an unconditional 60-day money-back guarantee, and may be purchased securely online at http://www.123loganalyzer.com/. There are no monthly fees or usage charges. You can download a 25-day trial version, with four of the seven advanced visitor-analysis filters activated.