Website statistics provide information about website traffic, including hits, files, pageviews, visits, response codes, URLs, referrers, search strings, and user agents. This data can shape advertising campaigns and site design. The most popular online website statistics system is Webalizer.
Website statistics are numbers and information that allow you to know data about the traffic coming to your website. From visible counters to invisible logs maintained by most server software, these numbers can be instrumental in shaping advertising campaigns and site design for a website.
The simplest type of site tracker is a basic counter. This is usually a little bit of JavaScript on a page that counts how many times the page is viewed. These are still used on a number of personal websites where the owner only cares about how many visitors his site gets or where the owner wants a public display of visitors that is easy to implement. Unfortunately, most meters are very unreliable; the accuracy of the data depends a lot on how it is written. Counters can ignore page views from visitors who have cookies disabled; every time a visitor hits refresh, the counter will most likely count a new visitor.
The raw data found in server logs can be analyzed by a number of software solutions. There are a number of professional locally run programs available that allow you to create custom visual graphs of server information. These programs range from free to hundreds of dollars for a personal license and have mostly been replaced by web-based analyzers.
The most popular online website statistics system is the Webalizer program. It’s free and open-source, easy to install, runs on a wide range of operating systems, and includes just about any data people care about. Also popular are the AWStats program (which has more detailed data) and the Analog program (which has a number of minor features missing from Webalizer).
Website statistics include the following information:
Evidence: This number is usually presented as both totals and averages over time periods. Hits are the number of times files and pages have been fetched from the server, in other words, every time a request has been sent to the server for a piece of information, a hit is recorded.
Files: This number represents how many non-html files the server has requested. This includes all used images, style sheet documents and media files.
Pageviews: Pageviews are how often a page has been viewed on your server. This number is often used when promoting advertising on a site, as it is a reasonable indication of how many times a banner will appear.
Visits: This number represents how many unique IPs (which is a good general measure for individual people) have visited the site. While many people use the term “hit” as if referring to the actual amount of traffic they’re getting, unique visitors are the actual measure of that.
Response Codes: The server logs also track the code received from each hit. A 200 code indicates that everything went as expected (the visitor made the request, the server received it and returned the appropriate file). A 206 indicates that the requested file was not delivered in full. A 404 means the requested file could not be found. There are a number of other possible answers, but these are the most important. If your logs show a huge number of 404 responses, then chances are you have a broken link, either somewhere on your site or on a site that links to you.
URLs: Tracking URLs gives you an idea of which specific files are the most popular on your site. This can help you determine which content areas are the most visited and also which pages have the most valuable advertising potential.
Referrer: The referrer is the website that linked to a page on your site. A direct request means that the visitor typed your URL directly, without following a hyperlink.
Search Strings: When appropriate (such as when directed by Google) logs track the search text that a visitor entered into a search engine to end up on your site. This can be very helpful in determining which keywords to keep targeting if you are trying to increase traffic to your site.
User Agent: The user agent is the browser the visitor uses to visit your site. Since this string can be modified by the user, it’s not entirely reliable, but it will give you an idea of which browsers most of your visitors are using. This can be very useful when planning a rebuild of your site, to determine what standards you need to comply with; if you have less than 1% of your users using Netscape 4.7, for example, you might decide they’re worth ignoring all together.
Website statistics provide a wonderful opportunity to fine-tune your site to keep up with the needs of your users, as well as providing you with a wealth of information that you can use to design advertising campaigns or sell advertising space on your site. They’re also fun to look at for personal sites, and since virtually all hosts now include free server log access, there’s no reason not to dig through them to see what you might find.
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