Joined on 06-29-2007
TechSoup Member
i would like to track website hits but do not know how, does anyone have advice for me?
Thanks!
Hi there,
To answer your question, you'll need to get a Web analytics tool which will give you reporting on lots of valuable information about your site's visitors. There are many tools that can do this (some are better than others).
Google Analytics is an excellent option for many people -- and it's free, too.
Everyone who runs a Web site should be familiar with the basics of Web analytics, and some of the tools available out there.
I recommend you also check out this recent article on TechSoup:
A Few Good Web Analytics Tools: Measure your Web site's success
Good luck!
Yann
Joined on 05-10-2007
TechSoup Member
I've used
Sitemeter for years on various sites and they provide a generous amount of information even for their free accounts. It's very unobstrusive and causes no problems when loading or viewing pages.
You may already have some options for tracking the traffic to your site. If you can mention who you are hosted with we can probably find out what options you may have.
Joined on 06-29-2007
TechSoup Member
We are hosted by A Small Orange
Everyone thinks they want to track their website hits. The concept sounds like a prudent thing to do, doesn't it?
Once you get the raw numbers, though, you will need to know how to interpret them. Learn what "bounce rate" means. Learn how to weed out the search engine spiders. Learn how to interpret what the numbers are telling you.
This can be a chore in itself. So, in order to choose the best site stats package for your needs, ask yourself what you want out of the data, and even better, develop a plan for what you are going to do depending on what the numbers suggest.
Joined on 02-09-2004
TechSoup Member
almost all Hosting providers give 'stats' tracking as part of their package.
before using a thirdparty product - look at the one provided with your package. In our case the hosting company uses
AWSTATS
regards
Michael
Joined on 03-17-2005
TechSoup Member
http://www.statcounter.com/
works really well.
A Small Orange does provide web stats with all their accounts, so I suggest that you contact them to see how you can access them.
Detailed Traffic Statistics
Growing your site's audience is easy with proper statistics. With all A Small Orange hosting accounts, you get access to two powerful stats packages: Webalizer and AWStats. Both provide you with vital information on what brings people to your site and what keeps them there. You can learn what search keywords bring in the big hits and what pages are most popular. You can also see what pages take up the most bandwidth so you can optimize for maximal usage of your bandwidth each month.
Joined on 08-10-2007
TechSoup Member
I also use statcounter. It is very relyable and provides lots of visitor detail. However, it can store up to 500 entries, or you have to subscribe to paid service.
Joined on 08-10-2007
TechSoup Member
Actually, if you know a bit PHP scripting langage, you can relatively easily build your own. I found this tutorial
http://www.phptutorial.info/scripts/Hit_counter.html and it looks pretty simple to implement.
Joined on 07-28-2003
TechSoup Member
I'd like to reiterate what tclaremont notes about understanding what the data means.
Unless you are using a sophicated back end stat pack that uses cookies to identify individual users, the best you can hope for is the number of hits on the server and general information like time, date, IP address, page entered and viewing time. You cannot differentiate users from a simple IP address as it might be from one user or multiple users at one location.
Having done this for a number of years, what I have found to be most valuable is to determine what pages my visitors are hitting on the most as well as determining what they are using as search parameters either on the site or through the major search engines. For example, one should expect that the majority of hits will come to the sites home page, but if you notice a spike in other pages (a particular product, event, or information set) it tells you volumes about what people are looking for. Simply knowing the numbers is like counting the cars on the highway. Knowing where they are going and why is much more valuable.
This process often takes some extrapolation and testing. For example when we run a particular event, I look for patterns to see if people are responding to print marketing or digital marketing based upon when the hits come in.
Similarly, if there is a particular topic that is hot in terms of the number of hits its page is recieving, perhaps its a good idea to add more information on the topic.
BTW, when you get in and look at the data you will usually find a very large number of hits coming from search engine "robots" - servers designed to go out and harvest information from your site. You'll need to subtract this from the total number to get a picture of how many real people are visiting your site.
Joined on 09-22-2005
TechSoup Member
Google Analytics is easy to set up. Just get a Google account, login and choose Analytics. You'll be given a single line of code to insert in your web pages and a day later Analytics will be showing you easy-to-understand stats and graphs.
I've used a dozen different stats packages and I prefer the free Google Analytics to any of them.
Jason King
Nonprofit Web Design Blog