Site Statistics with Web Hosting Tools
Site statistics allow you to track your websites visitors so that you know where people are coming from, what they are viewing on your site and what you can do to improve visitor numbers and the time people spend on your website.
The main reasons for using site statistics are:
- View latest visitors
- View total unique daily, weekly and monthly visitors
- View error logs
- Track disk usage
- Track bandwidth usage
- See which keywords people used to find your site in the search engines
cPanel and other Web Hosting Control Panels
cPanel and other web hosting control panels are equipped with free stats packages. Although you can buy expensive statistical software there is no real need as the inbuilt cPanel software combined with other free stats sites like Google Analytics and StatCounter can all combine to present a total view of what is happening on your website.
Most cPanel packages come with the follow site statistics software:
- AwStats - stats software
- Webalizer - stats software
- Raw Log Manager - shows who accessed your site. No graphics are used here, it is just raw data that you can download
- Referrer Logs - Referrer logs show in more details where your site details are coming from
- Error Logs - Shows if any visitors have got website errors whilst navigating your site. Shows exact error message and location
AwStats updates in real time so there is no need to wait 24 hours or more for up to date stats. You can find very accurate information about unique visitors as well as click paths (where your visitors clicked on your site).
Awstats also lets you see exactly where your visitors are coming from. This is vital as you can decide whether your marketing efforts are working or not. This includes search engines, referrals, banner ads, emails etc.
You can also analyze downloads from your site which is great if you are bandwidth conscious or need to know whether there is any unlawful access to your downloads.
Webalizer is the other main stats package that is free with cPanel. Webalizer shows graphs and charts so is a very graphical interface, more so than Awstats.
Webalizer shows a monthly summary for the past 12 months and here you can view daily statistics and even hourly statistics. You can see which pages were the entry pages for visitors and which were the exit pages (where they came and left your site). You'll also see referrers (who sent visitors to your site) and of course the top keyword phrases people used to find your site in search engines.
Analyzing site statistics is vital to improving your site as you can discover new keywords to target and ultimately figure out what is working and what needs to be worked on to increase the traffic to your web site.