Best free website traffic statistics software
Question:
What software do you use for tracking your website visitor statistics?
Answer:
I love AWStats.
Install AWStats, and you’ll be given a webpage with your website’s traffic statistics. You’ll need to run a cron job on your server to update the stats as needed (I update once per day at 6am, for example), or you can set up AWStats to read your websie logs and generate stats on the fly.
Scroll through the stats, and you’ll find a very comprehensive listing on statistics and information. AWStats takes your server’s traffic logs and parses them in a format much easier to read. Here are some sections I find particularly helpful:
MONTHLY HISTORY / DAYS OF MONTH: Use this to get an overall view of your website’s traffic. While traffic will fluctuate, we want to see these numbers go up over the coming months and years. “Unique visitors” and “Number of visits” are the numbers to pay attention to.
HOSTS (TOP 10): Use this to know what IP addresses are visiting you the most. Think of these as “real people” browsing your website. Note that by default, your own visits will appear here. As you gain more visitors, your visits will eventually be pushed lower down in this list.
PAGES-URL (TOP 10): Use this to see what your website’s most popular pages are.
CONNECT TO SITE FROM: Use this to see who’s sending you your visitors. The search engine detail (“Links from an Internet Search Engine“) and other websites (“Links from an external page“) tends to be pretty interesting. If you see a spike in traffic, you can usually narrow it down where it came from by looking here.
SEARCH KEYPHRASES (TOP 10): This part is extremely helpful. It tells you what people typed into their search engine to find your website! This will give you detail on what people often search for when looking for your site. You can better massage your own writing to better match what people are looking for, increasing your traffic. Or you can use this data to come up with new post ideas. (If you’ve written about “blue bugs”, and you see people are hitting your site by looking for “blue striped bugs”, you might get more traffic if you wrote an article about the blue striped bugs subspecies.)
While you can certainly show this to anyone you want, I strongly recommend you make all AWStats information private and password-protected. Make sure those that see the stats are people you trust not to abuse the information (and it can be abused, specifically in the form of stolen web traffic). As they say, “there is gold in the visitor logs”. They tell you who came to your site and why.
AWStats is among the best of the free web traffic analyzers (and is better than many commercial solutions). It does a LOT, and I’ve only implemented the basic version with just a few tweaks.
Now, I’m giving you tips on how I use the statistics info. This might be overkill. Or it might not. Use it however you’d like. If it’s to help you pull in more traffic, great. If you could care less about optimizing for more traffic, and just want to write your posts, and only want this info for satisfying your curiosity, that’s fine too!
I’ve been extremely happy with AWStats – it’s what I use for tracking website statistics. I hope you get a similar benefit!
