Website Analytics: Understanding Basic Web Site Statistics

A couple of weeks ago I posted an article on Website Analytics An Overview Of Traffic Statistics which was a pretty basic post about traffic stats. I have gotten a ton of emails from people who want to know more about analytics, how they work and why they are so important.

I want to take a second to let everyone know that while I appreciate emails and questions, it would do everyone a favor if questions were posted as comments on the blog post. This helps keep everything organized and helps me keep my posts fresh in the SERPS. Even though WordPress asks for an email address to comment, I don’t ever SPAM or contact my readers ever. Feel free to leave your questions as comments so everyone can benefit.

Basic Web Analytics – Simple Traffic Statistics

Just about everyone and their mother has a website these days, but most of my readers have a site that one way or another makes money. Whether you sell software or products right from your site or you provide a service and your site generates leads, your site is an important part of your business. In fact the majority of my clients rely solely on their site for income.

If you have a site, you have stats. No matter what platform your site is hosted on, your server tracks your site visitors, where they came from, what type of browser they use, etc. All of these stats can tell you important information. For example by looking at the average screen resolution of your site visitors you can tell if your site is configured properly so users don’t have to do any unnecessary scrolling. Knowing the keywords users typed in to find you can help you build up keyword strategy and build more pages with content that visitors are interested in.

Using A Web Based Analytics Web Traffic Program

While it is true that you could invest a ton of money and get a program like WebTrends which is a very expensive, but powerful suite of tools for analytics, most web site owners can get everything they need out of a tool like Google Analytics. One of the problems with Google Analytics is that there is a limit to how much traffic it will process. While that number is pretty high at 5 million page views per month, if you have an “active” AdSense account there is no limit. What Google considers as active is any one’s guess.

I could devote a whole post to what the difference is between page views, hits, unique visitors and visitors. 5 million page vies a month is a lot of traffic. If your site is getting that much traffic then you can easily fork over the money for an advanced web analytics package.

Google is free, but if you need more features specifically conversion tracking and custom funnels there are paid services like Web Side Story that are also web based. A Web Based tracking system means that you have to install code usually at the very bottom of every page, usually before the </body> tag. The stats are kept on the tracking system’s server.

While Web Side Story is very powerful it is also difficult to configure unless you are a geek like me or you can hire a consultant. Don’t bother trying to get support out of them, they are pretty weak in that area. In fact one of my clients just dumped them due to support issues. I was getting a lot of great data from them, but it would take weeks to get help in setting up the conversion data we needed to track software sales from search engine > keyword typed > entry page > navigation > demo download > eventual purchase.

That last sentence is an example of a conversion funnel. With software it can be days between the demo download to the purchase. This is the primary weakness of Google Analytics, and even to an extent WSS and OneStat. WebTrends and NetTracker rely upon log files which means they can’t give you real time statistics, but because they are server based, they have scripting and cookie services that allow you to plant a tracker on your visitors so you can see a sale days after a download of a demo.

Traffic Statistics Gathering on Windows IIS Server

While it is true that IIS (that is Windows’ webserver) collects stats automatically, you do have to go into your site’s definition file and make sure that all the available stats are being gathered. By default only the most basic visitor stats are collected. A program like Webalizer can take your traffic logs and view the stats in an easy to read format locally on your computer or online through a web interface.

Traffic Statistics Gathering on Apache Linux Web Server

Like many of you I prefer open source web servers. I am an Apache and Red Hat guy and have been for a long time. Systems like WordPress run better in the environment they were meant for. I have ported many an open source system over to the Windows PHP Triad system, and it leaves a lot to be desired.

Apache saves visitor tracking very much like IIS and you also have the option of choosing what stats you want to track. Most of the servers I have set up keep the stats and traffic logs in the default path /etc/httpd/logs/access_log, but I always make a custom location based upon the domain name. Again Webalizer is an easy system to use, but you should see what your hosting provider uses and supports.

Since I have my own servers I have a lot more options than most of my readers. If you are hosting just 1 website you will have to see what your host uses. I don’t know of any hosting company that doesn’t account for web traffic analysis. Even GoDaddy hosting has an OK system.

I will be getting into great detail about web analytics over the next week.