An important part of your ability to make your website or blog a success is having metrics to measure yourself against. There are numerous services that allow you to do this. Some may or may not be better than others. In my opinion that is not important. The important thing is that you find one you like and stick with it. That way, every time you look at a report and compare it to your past results, you’re comparing apples to apples. The important thing is that you see growth in numbers.
I use two analysis programs. Both regress slightly different results. One, is Google Analytics. The second is AWstats, which is installed on my server by my hosting company. It is relatively standard in all hosting companies. I will discuss the features of Google’s solution in the future.
AWstats uses server logs to collect your data for you.
AWStats will show you the following information:
* Number of visits and number of unique visitors,
* Duration of visits and last visits,
* Authenticated users, and last authenticated visits,
* Weekdays and peak hours (pages, visits, KB for each hour and day of the week),
* Domains/countries of visiting hosts (pages, hits, KB, 269 domains/countries detected, GeoIp detection),
* List of hosts, last visits and list of unresolved IP addresses,
* Most viewed pages, entry and exit,
* Typical files,
* Web compression statistics (for mod_gzip or mod_deflate),
* OS used (pages, visits, KB for each OS, 35 OS detected),
* Browsers used (pages, visits, KB for each browser, each version (Web, Wap, Media browsers: 97 browsers, more than 450 if you use the browsers_phone.pm library file),
* Robot visits (319 robots detected),
* Worm attacks (5 families of worms),
* Search engines, key phrases and keywords used to find your site (The 115 most famous search engines such as yahoo, google, altavista, etc… are detected),
* HTTP errors (Page not found with last reference, …),
* Other custom reports based on url, url parameters, referrer field for misc/marketing purposes,
* Number of times your site is “bookmarked”.
* Screen size (you need to add some HTML tags on the index page).
* Proportion of browsers supporting: Java, Flash, RealG2 Reader, Quicktime Reader, WMA Reader, PDF Reader (need to add some HTML tags on index page).
* Cluster report for proportion of load balanced servers.
