Monitoring Website Statistics

For the next few posts, I want to turn our attention to various tools that all website owners should have.  The first is a quality website statistics reporting tool.

In the early days of of the Internet, the only traffic reporting tool that was well known were those tacky page counters at the bottom of the page.  In today's world we need a reporting tool that gives us a lot more information if we are to manage our websites intelligently.

Website statistic programs come in a variety of configurations ranging in price from free to over $10,000.  There are basically two kinds of reporting methods used, log file analysis and what I call dynamic analysis.  With log file analysis tools, the statistics program reads the entries in the server's log files and reports the who, what, when, and where of traffic stats.  The dynamic analysis tools require a snippet of code to be placed on every web page that you want to track.  When the tracked page is viewed, an entry is made into a collection file or database recording the traffic stats.

In my experience the log file analysis tools have not only been more inaccurate, but if the hosting company you are using decides to wipe out your log files, then there goes your statistics.  This has happened to me on a couple of different times and is quite frustrating for me and my web clients.

The other basic decision you have to make is whether to install and manage the tracking and reporting software yourself or have it hosted on a third-party server.  If you are comfortable installing software on your own then I would go with this option.  Otherwise, paying a  monthly fee to someone else to host your data is quite acceptable.  Personally, I prefer to be in control and host the data myself.

The more sophisticated the program you purchase, the more information that will be available to you.  At a minimum, here is the information you should expect to see reported:

• Summary statistics reported monthly, weekly, and daily
• Number of unique visitors
• Total pages viewed
• Top websites referring traffic to your site
• Top Search Engines referring traffic to your site
• Top keywords used by your visitors
• Top entry and exit pages
• Most viewed pages
• Statistics such as browsers, operating systems, and screen resolution used to view your site

Pro Tip: All to often I still hear a client say "How many hits does my website get?"  A web page is made up of many different smaller parts, such as image files.  It is not uncommon for a web page to have 5, 10, or even 20 individual parts loaded to display the page.  One page view may have up to 20 "hits" recorded.  As you can see this measurement will give you a false indication of the actual traffic.  The better question to ask is "How many page views does my website get?"

Armed with this information, my next post will get into specific programs that are available and I'll recommend an inexpensive but high quality statistics program that I use for my site and my clients.