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 want

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

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.

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

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

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.

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, Trends, gives the evolution and geographical searches.
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.

Best statistics services and tools

To have all the stats needed on your website, here is a list of tools...

Demo of web stats with Piwik

Demo of stats with Piwik

See also