Statistics tools for webmasters

Information about the trends of the Web is what makes the difference between a site that knows success and a site that has stagnated in anonymity and did not progress. But it is now easy to be informed, obtaining very detailed statistics on one hand about the visitors of a site and on the other about Web trends.

Essentially, statistical tools indicate what's most interesting for visitors to the site, then what must be developed and secondly what they are looking on the Web, so how to complete it ...

Know your visitors and what they read

These data are provided with tools and services from various sources.

Services provided by hosts

Most hosts provide a statistical tool that uses data collected by the server, to establish statistical information:

• Number of unique visitors per day.
• Percentage of traffic generated by each page.
• Summaries on monthly and annual basis.

These tools are Urchin, and Webalyzer and Awstats that are open source. The first does not distinguish between visits from people from those of robots, from search engines mainly, and therefore provide inflated data.

Free online statistics services

These statistical services require that you install JavaScript code on each page. They provide these data:

• Number of visitors on a real graph.
• Bounce factor.
• Traffic of most often seen pages.

There are no summaries. The values this time are under-valued, because all Internet users do not activate JavaScript code, and secondly, on a site built manually, not all pages include the code.
The major online service is Analytics.

Other statistical data on the site

Whether online or provided by the server, these tools generally indicate:

• The average time spent for a visitor.
• The geographical distribution of visitors
• The parts of direct access and search engines.

All these data can be described as "statistical results".The webmaster may also need data on the Web in general to guide the site's contents.

Tools to guide the content of the site

To find out what issues are relevant on Internet, you could attempt to know the keywords that are most often sought. Google shares the content provided by its search engine, Insights for Search, gives the evolution and geographical searches.

To find out if a keyword, corresponding to the theme of a site or a page is very sought, rely on Google Trends. A similar service, Google suggest when you type a keyword gives you a list of similar words and demand for each. It is now added to the interface of the search engine.

Statistics services and tools

• Webalyzer
  Statistical server side software that displays in HTML statistics from the logs.
• Awstats
  A server-side tool that works in CGI or command line.
• Google Analytics. Client side tool with JavaScript code to include. To find out what happens once the visitor arrives on your site. Complete statistical reports, including bounce factor, mean time on the site, percents of clicks on links in a page. A JavaScript code must be inserted in each page.
  Note the Urchin software which is the basis of this tool is no longer provided by Google.
• ClickHeat. How where visitors clic in your pages. Require a JavaScript code, PHP and a database.
  
• Piwik
  Open source alternative to Analytics. It uses JavaScript but the backend is on your server thanks to a PHP and MySQL tool. Successor to PHPMyVisites. Requires PHP and MySQL. A PHP code must be inserted on each page.
• Footprint
  Uses JavaScript too provide real-time info on the traffic of the site.
• Sitemeter
  Other monitoring of traffic.

See also

• List of services and tools for the webmaster.
• Statistics about webmasters. Services used and coding practices.
  

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