Web statistics are vital to website owners. This information will determine a number of things that you do, or do not do, concerning your website. It will also tell you how people arrive at your website, how long they stay, and how they leave. Many Web Hosting companies include website statistic software with their hosting packages.

Log File

Regardless of what type of website statistic software is used, all visits to your site are logged with server software. The information about those visits goes into what is known as a Log File, and the information typically includes the IP address of the visitor, the browser they used, the pages that they viewed, how many seconds, minutes, or hours they stayed on your site, what search engine or webpage referred them to your site, and even the keywords that were used, if a search engine was used.

While all of this information is highly useful, it is not presented in a very user friendly way. Raw Log Files are messy at best, and hard to read and understand. Fortunately, those raw log files can be accessed by other software, so that it can be displayed in a more pleasing – and easy to read – manner. You can view the statistics in colorful charts and pies – or with well organized text.

If you are using the statistics program provided by your Web Hosting Company, you usually will not have to do anything to make the program start tracking visitors. It should happen automatically. If you are using a third party program, however, you will usually need to include a bit of HTML code on each page that you want tracked. As far as the programs that are made available through the Web Hosting companies, however, the best seem to be Webalizer, Awstats, and Analog. All of these programs are free, and if they are not provided by your host, you can probably get them yourself and install them.

If you use Webalizer, here is what some of your stat pages will look like:

 

Hits

If you are new to owning a website, you may not understand some of the terminology used in the web stats. For example, you may see ‘number of hits,’ ‘number of pages,’ ‘number of visitors,’ and ‘number of unique visitors.’ Some of this information will matter, while other information will not.

If you hear someone say that they had ’10,000 hits on their site’ this does not mean that they had 10,000 visitors. It means that there were 10,000 requests made in connection with the site components, such as graphics, scripts, content, etc. If your index, or home page, has 10 graphics and 2 scripts, you would have 13 hits each time someone viewed the page. The page itself counts as 1 hit.

Page Views

The number of page views, however, is much more interesting and useful. This tells you which of your pages are the most popular, and which are the least popular. This is good information to be able to access when you are running a promotion for a very specific page on your site, as it will give you an indication as to how that promotion is working out for you.

Entry and Exit Pages

This leads us to the entry and exit pages, which are also shown within a good stats program. You can see which page is the most popular for site entry, as well as which page most visitors exit the site from. Obviously, you would want to make that popular entry page extra special – and figure out what is causing or allowing visitors to leave on the ‘popular’ exit page.

Referring Sites

The referring sites section of the stats is also interesting and important, as this allows you to see exactly where your traffic is coming from. This will determine whether or not you increase advertising through some sources, while you do away with advertising on unprofitable, less producing sources.

Some of the website statistic software used by Web Hosting companies, however, does not give enough information. If this is the case, you may want to look for third party statistic software to use on your site, so that you can get a better overall picture of your website traffic.

A third party web statistic company usually offers a great deal more information about your visitors than you can expect from your Web Hosting Company. Some services are free, and limited, while the prices for the better services vary.