Understanding and utilizing website statistics: Part II

By Ivan Peevski Last month we talked about what can be measured about your visitors. This week we are going to continue on that topic by showing you some useful tools to help you with that process. There are a number of factors that may affect the accuracy of the registered statistics. Some common factors are whether the statistics are gathered at the beginning or the end of page loading. Another factor is whether statistics are gathered by processing the server's log files, an independent application/server, sitting between the server and client to do the monitoring or using a client-based technique. Server monitoring will give the most results, but will not be able to determine some client details. Some actual tools to help any website owner with their statistics gathering process (and employed by us here at rejournal.com). * Awstats: a free, open-source tool that parses server log files and summarizes their content into an easy to understand and follow HTML page. It displays statistics about "unique views," "views," "page views" and "hits," as well as giving summary of those by day, day of the week, hour of the day; by geographical location; by source, referral site, referring search engine; by visit duration; by content; by browser, operating system and more. * Google Analytics: excellent tool, provided for free by the guys at google. Website owners are just asked to create a free registration and add a snippet of code to the bottom of the pages they want to monitor, and google does all the rest for them. It does an excellent job of drilling down to considerable dept.-based on a large number of meaningful parameters, as well as making it really easy to compare data to previous periods. Another notable feature is the goals tracking functionality, which lets web administrators find out how their visitors (prospects) turn into actual clients (buyers), where do they come from and how they used the site before they finally decided to get to one of the golden pages that all business owners are hoping they would get to. * Webalizer: similar to awstats, free open-source project that has lots of meaningful graphs to help you monitor and understand your traffic. One drawback compared to awstats is that it does not display visits statistics. Ivan Peevski is the chief technical officer of the New England and New York Real Estate Journals, Accord, Mass.