Many folks, when they are just starting out in their website monitoring endeavors, are lost when it comes to issues involving general website statistics, logfiles, and tracking. While there are many tools you can employ, both paid and otherwise, one of the most useful and easy to understand solutions comes right in the cPanel of your web hosting account.
This would be AWStats. It is a tool designed to render web, mail and server statistics in a graphic format. It is a free tool licensed under the GNU General Public License, and can be found on many popular web hosts, and can also be downloaded and installed on any server that allows Perl, CGI, and log access.
One of the advantages of using AWStats is that it can be very useful in showing you just how vital learning how to use site metrics can be to your overall website success. It’s a bit more than simply knowing how many people visited that day. Programs like these can show you where your traffic is emanating from, how long it stays around, which pages are popular, which pages people leave from, the time people spend on your site, the keywords they use to find you, and much, much more.
Want to know whether or not you’re getting traffic from abroad? AWStats can show you which of 269 different countries have paid your site a visit, and not only that, but which of 97 different browsers these sites may have used. It can also determine which particular domains are paying you the most attention, as well as which search engines.
It can show you exactly how many visits you’re getting from 319 robots, and how long they’re around. It tracks and records visits from over 115 search engines, and the particular stats for each one. It returns you a list of error pages, and inbound links to your site, along with the anchor text used.
AWStats can tell you how many times your pages have been favorited or bookmarked, and you have the ability to set up customized reports for many marketing tasks you might have. You can also see the days of the week, and the hours of the day that get the most traffic, which can be very helpful information to have when planning pay per click marketing campaigns.
AWStats is also very useful in determining whether or not someone is hotlinking files from your site, and can help ferret out bandwidth thieves.
One day you may want to move on to more advanced web analytics programs that can help you with items like tracking visitor behavior on your site, how are they engaging with your content, and which of them are completing actions on your site.
While there may be more statistics applications out there with more juice, AWStats is a great way to get your feet wet, and to begin analyzing the type and makeup of the traffic that you’re currently getting to your website. You need to make a start somewhere, and AWStats is a great place to begin!
