Knowing your website visitor metrics is useful for many different purposes. It lets you know how popular your website is. It provides you with a measurement point for marketing, SEO, and conversion efforts. It’s useful to your friendly IT staff if you need help troubleshooting issues with slowness or resource overuse. It’s also just nice to know who your visitors are and how they use your website.
There are a myriad of tools available to help you analyze your website traffic. One of the best known and full-featured ones is Google Analytics. Google Analytics checks publicly-available network records to determine your traffic statistics.
Another great option is AWStats. AWStats is free, works on Windows servers, and works directly from your traffic logs to determine your traffic statistics.
The graphics are a little Web 1.0, but don’t let that fool you: AWStats delivers the details you need to make informed decisions about your website. In fact, since locally-installed tools like AWStats and external tools like Google Analytics work from different sources to make their calculations, you should use both! That way you’ll have the maximum possible information about your website traffic.
By Sharon Campbell