A big part of running any site is keeping track of your traffic. Seasoned webmasters are notorious for pouring over traffic stats. The reason is simple: traffic sources are the lifeblood of any site. It’s akin to water and a riverbed. Take away the water and the river goes away – and everything tied to it. So, if you have never thought about tracking website traffic, you should start – yesterday. When we speak of analytics, we are simply talking about tracking website visitor behavior. Again, this helps us to know how our site is performing, how we can improve it, and what problems visitors are encountering.

The advantage of websites is that we can pretty accurately track our visitors. This information is incredibly valuable. Offline companies spend millions and millions of dollars to find out who their customers are, where they come from, etc. You can readily garner some of that information by using a simple statistics tracking program. This will allow you to see how your visitor entered your site. Did they use a search engine? Were they referred by another site? Did they have your site bookmarked? You need to know how people are coming to your site. Next, you can track what the visitor does once they are on your site. You can see where most people drop off your site. You can see how long they stay. That kind of information really is gold. And this also applies for non-commercial sites. Afterall, you built a site for a reason – to get people to read it or come to it.

Here are a few free statistics packages:

StatCounter – This free site offers you a host of very nice features. You can see referrers, entry pages, exit pages, keyword analysis, visitor maps (Google Maps feature), browser-type, etc.

Site Meter – Another good, free program that allows you to see similar types of metrics.

Google Analytics – An incredibly powerful, free program. Google’s analytics program is so powerful, we still can’t believe that they offer it for free.

Webalizer – “The Webalizer is a fast, free web server log file analysis program. It produces highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in HTML format, for viewing with a standard web browser. It was written to solve several problems that I had with currently available analysis packages. A vast majority of them were written in Perl or some other scripting language, and took forever to run. Some were not free. Some even produced wrong results, or results that were not in a format I found very useful.”

Awstats – “AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers.”

What you will find in the preceding list is that some are log file analyzers and others are tagging systems. They both have their pros and cons. Wikipedia has a nice summary of the advantages of both of these types:

“Advantages of logfile analysis

The main advantages of logfile analysis over page tagging are as follows.

• The web server normally already produces logfiles, so the raw data is already available. To collect data via page tagging requires changes to the website.
• The web server reliably records every transaction it makes. Page tagging relies on the visitors’ browsers co-operating, which a certain proportion may not do (for example, if JavaScript is disabled).
• The data is on the company’s own servers, and is in a standard, rather than a proprietary, format. This makes it easy for a company to switch programs later, use several different programs, and analyze historical data with a new program. Page tagging solutions involve vendor lock-in.
• Logfiles contain information on visits from search engine spiders. Although these should not be reported as part of the human activity, it is important data for performing search engine optimization.
• Logfiles contain information on failed requests; page tagging only records an event if the page is successfully viewed.

Advantages of page tagging

The main advantages of page tagging over logfile analysis are as follows.

• The JavaScript is automatically run every time the page is loaded. Thus there are fewer worries about caching.
• It is easier to add additional information to the JavaScript, which can then be collected by the remote server. For example, information about the visitors’ screen sizes, or the price of the goods they purchased, can be added in this way. With logfile analysis, information not normally collected by the web server can only be recorded by modifying the URL.
• Page tagging can report on events which do not involve a request to the web server, such as interactions within Flash movies.
• The page tagging service manages the process of assigning cookies to visitors; with logfile analysis, the server has to be configured to do this.
• Page tagging is available to companies who do not run their own web servers.”

Source Wikipedia Web Analytics

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