Website Traffic Analysis with Webalizer
Friday, July 3rd, 2009For starters, skip the “hit counter” tools. Counters are misleading and ultimately worth nothing in terms of ascertaining your site’s success.
A lot of web-hosting services offer Webalizer. There may be different “server-side” statistic programs like AWStats installed as well. It is up to you what to use, or you may even have multiple tracking systems simultaneously, if your host allows. (Statistics software causes a lot of work for the server, and many hosts do not allow more than one at a time.)
Comprehending Webalizer (This list is by no means complete)
Finding the Statistics
A bar-chart of your yearly traffic history will be displayed when you log into Webalizer. Click the name of the month on the table graph to view the details. When you select the month, you will see a thorough analysis of your website traffic. In fact, probably more information than you will ever use.
Referrers: When a person clicks on a link from a different site that directs to yours, this is termed a referral. Webalizer lets you know which site was the source of the referral. In case they discovered you through a Google search, you are informed of this (you are not told what they were searching for though). Those who enroll in Google Analytics can find out what the search intent was, however it is not stored on the server. It is necessary to add a code snippet or script to every page footer that you want to monitor if you use Analytics.
Files and Hits: These statistics are the most misleading. It’s considered a “hit” every time a URL is entered. This includes when the URL is not spelled right or has expired. It’s considered a “file” when something is downloaded correctly (such as pages, images, sounds, videos, etc).
Page: When a “hit” occurs on a genuine page, then it is called a page. (Images or flash objects that are not embedded in a page do not count. The names of pages will end in “html”, “php”, “asp”, etc.).
Visitor: Normally the IP address is used to identify a visitor. This could be misleading since if one or more visitors use the identical ISP, or are hidden behind a firewall, they might not be correctly identified. In addition, if a visitor takes too long to move from one page to the next, they may end up being counted as two separate visitors. This usually occurs at 30 minutes but may be changed by the host.
Webalizer also counts the Web crawlers (bots) which “crawl” your site. These can found in the “sites” segment of the rundown. You may be be shocked with the amount of spiders on your site, and how much bandwidth they consume. Preventing unwanted bots and spiders from crawling your site is simple; all you have to do is create or edit a file called “robots.txt” and place it your site’s home folder. The majority of crawlers will do what you tell them to, but they don’t have to.