Hello,

Websites statistics can be a a very good way to help you understand what visitors are "seeing"/"doing" on your site, and to help you improve your website to keep visitors or your site (buying things to increase your revenue directly or just browsing to help you on advertising sales).

I think there are 2 main solutions used for website analysis:
1. Those using website logs (RAW logs). There are 2-3 solutions for this:

1a. Hosted software on your server as webalizer, awstats, and so on:

This are mainly not real time analyzers, which means they most often refreshing analysis in 24 hours or so.

This are i would say solutions for quick overview, they providing lot of details, but mostly over basic things as:
- hourly/daily/monthly stats as: visitors, page views, hits, bandwidth
- countries of origin
- hosts
- spiders
- visit duration
- top pages
- browsers, operating systems
- search keywords
- status codes.

However, i think those softwares doesn't offer advanced tools for analysis as:
- goal tracking
- bounce rate
- aso

1b. Services/Software using RAW logs for analysis

This are using same data source as on 1a case but offers sometime also advanced analysis.
I was using personally ClickTracks software for this. Was nice i could set goal tracking to see how convert was working; also to see graphical views of site pages and where to are going visitors from that page, aso. Was quite nice to be able to compare behavior for different keywords, aso.

With those software/services you got a high grade of confidence none is using/seeing your site stats.

2. Online Services
I was using lot of services in time, now i am playing with Google Analytics which i found it very good due to fact i can compare data in an advanced way.
By example i was able to check Bounce rate for Search engines / Direct visitors / Referring sites, which can give a very good idea about who is really giving you visitors, and so on.

This data is in fact collected by those services and they are able to use them for their own purpose (mainly been probably for advertising).


So i guess is up to anyone to select his own tool for website analysis. I prefer using a hosted solution over server for a quick understanding of basic things:
- how much visitors we get from a day to another
- how many are coming from SE or from Direct Links or third party sites

To be able to better understand your visitors you need however to dig more using a specialized service or a software.

I used awstat.
sorry, but doesn't this threads What do you use? is similar? or it's want discuss the feature? Thanks

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May be same. I just tried to show different types of stats solutions.

If you have cPanel, you have AwStats. I'd recommend that one.
Webalizer has been found to be inaccurate.
StatCounter is the best free counter, or alternative.

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Jerlene
DNLodge.com
manual Directory Submission Service

I've always used AwStats, they have wonderful service, and never really let me down..

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I agree. Once, my data got erased but my host recovered it and I loved them again.

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Jerlene
DNLodge.com
manual Directory Submission Service

Thats wonderful. Some websites really never aim towards helping users..

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Google Analytics. I use this mainly because it seems simple and effective. It also has great tracking tools and can tell you info I wouldn't have known otherwise. I have cPanel and so I should try AwStats out really.

I've found Google Analytics to be far superior to AwStats. While it does take a bit of getting used to, the details are broken down on a larger scale.

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I found Google Analytics to be in accurate at some times.

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