Web site statistics
This page is part of Ron Mertens' web page guides.
Your web site statistics is something that is both extremely fun and important. It is important to see who visits your page,
what they are doing there, and where are they coming from.
Server logs
Your server keeps a log of every request to the web server. Usually the server will record the time, the IP address, the
referral link (i.e. what did the user click on to reach your page), which page they visited, and also a host of information
about the user such as operation system, browser, screen size, etc.
While it is possible to look at the log as it is, it's not very helpful. There are a lot of tools that take this raw
information, process it, and then presents it in some nice way.
Uniques and pages
One of the first thing that is important to know, is the difference between a page view and unique "user".
Page views are simple - every time there is a request to view a web page, it counts as a page view. A unique user however
is identified by his IP address. That means that if the same user viewed 5 different pages, it counts as one unique but
5 page views.
Please note that some of your web site visitors are not clients, and they are not even human. There are many search engine
'robot' crawlers that surf the web and collect data. There's GoogleBot, and Yahoo's Slurp, and lot's of others.
They still count as pages and uniques, although some stat viewers will list them as robots, and will not count them
as "real page views".
AWStats
AWStats is an open source, on-line stat viewer. Usually it comes built in your web site control panel. AWStats gives rather
nice graphic sites, and includes lot's of information. You can see what search keyword people typed in Google to reach your
site, or what links they use. How your site behaved on each day of the week, user profiles, and more. Here are
some screen captures from the AWStats as run on one of my sites -
So how can I use my stats?
There are several things you can learn from viewing your statistics -
- User profile - for example, if many people use Firefox to surf your site, maybe you should optimize for this
browser. Or if many people user explorer, you should offer a Firefox download?
- Referral - This is one of the most crucial bits. How are people reaching your web site? Which links are they using?
If you setup an advertisement campaign, you can see how many people clicked on your ad to reach your page.
- Search keywords - again, very important. If you know what people are searching, you can optimize for those words, or
maybe buy relating keywords in Google to get sponsored links, etc.
Desktop log software
There are many software packages that you can download (and sometimes need to purchase) in order to view your statistics in
your own desktop machine. Usually they will download the server logs themselves from your server. These offer much more
extensive statistics than on-line free tools such as AWStats.
Google analytics
Google analytics is a free service by Google. The idea is that you insert some small Javascript code inside each of your page.
This will keep track the user, and will give you extensive stats about your site.
The amount of information you can get is amazing, and Analytics can also hook into your AdWords account (Google advertisement
platform) and you can really see how your visitors behave after they clicked on your ads to reach your site.
I personally found Analytics a bit too overwhelming. There was so much information, and yet the interface was a bit slow (as
web applications go) so I stopped using it. But if you like stats, or are serious about your site, it might be interesting
to check it out.
What's next?
Now to the biggest question of it all. How do you make money?...
