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Promote It! Tracking Your Users

Traffic Software

Even a moderately popular site can produce thousands of new lines, or hits, in a log file every day. To keep yourself sane, consider using a site traffic tool to interpret your log files for you.

Sources of Traffic Tools

You can use three possible sources of traffic tools:

  1. Software that's installed on your Web site’s server.
  2. Bits of code you place on your Web pages, which feed traffic information to a tracking service on another server.
  3. Built-in tools offered by the content management software you're using.

We’ll discuss the second and third options in the next section. They may not be necessary because many Web hosting companies are now including a tracking program in their hosting package. Check with your host to see what tools they offer. Here some of the traffic monitoring tools your Web host may provide:

The Webalizer

Unix-based hosting companies often have The Webalizer pre-installed. It’s free and offers basic traffic statistics. The Webalizer generates reports on a monthly basis and breaks the numbers down further to show you daily and hourly usage, top URLs accessed, top entry pages, top exit pages, top refers, top search strings and country numbers. The last significant update to The Webalizer was in 2000. Some bugs have been fixed since then, but nothing significant has been added.

Visit MR UNIX to find out more and download the program.

Urchin

Another frequently used traffic tool is Urchin, which can be installed as a software program on Windows or UNIX Web servers, or you can sign up for it on Urchin’s Web site (http://www.urchin.com). There are both free and paid versions. The free version of Urchin is somewhat hobbled. The pay version is gratifyingly robust. The most recent version of the Urchin software tracks visitors, Flash, banner ads and e-mail campaigns. Neither the hosted nor the installable package is cheap. Urchin On Demand, the Web-based service, is $495 a month. Urchin Software is $895.


AWStats

What are robots and spiders?

These small programs are sent out by search engines like Yahoo and Google to track and catalog the growth of the Web. They look for new pages, or new information on existing pages, and send back reports to their respective search engines. Robots and spiders help your favorite search engine provide up-to-date, accurate results. Their visits to your site count as traffic, so it’s good to use a traffic analysis tool that can distinguish between them and actual human visitors.

AWStats is a Perl-based stats tool available for free. It works with nearly every kind of Web server software, but is slower than The Webalizer. On the plus side, it's still in active development and offers numerous features not available elsewhere, including tracking of hits by robots and spiders, site visit lengths and sizes of your users’ monitor screens. Assuming your site doesn't need to handle zillions of lines of log files, this tool is a decent choice. It also analyzes FTP – files transferred to and from your site – and keeps track of any e-mail sent to and from your site.

You can learn more about AWStats at SourceForge.net.

     

WebTrends

On Windows Web servers, WebTrends is a common software tracking solution. It does an excellent job of mapping the path visitors take through your site and the results of Web visits. WebTrends is ideal if you want to see how your visitors used your site – what pages they looked at, in which order, for how long, and whether or not they bought anything – rather than simply collecting the overall numbers describing your Web traffic. There's no free version available, but the pricing is $495 if you have less than one million page views a year. WebTrends has also started offering a Web-based On Demand solution. Costs vary depending on the amount of traffic your site gets.

The WebTrends site (http://www.webtrends.com) offers a guided interactive tour of its heavily graphical interface.