Statistics tools for webmasters

Information about the trends of the Web is what makes the difference between a site that knows success and a site that has stagnated in anonymity and did not progress. But it is now easy to be informed, obtaining very detailed statistics on one hand about the visitors of a site and on the other about Web trends.

Essentially, statistical tools indicate what's most interesting for visitors to the site, then what must be developed and secondly what they are looking on the Web, so how to complete it ...

Know your visitors and what they want

Most hosts provide a statistical tool that uses data collected by the server, to establish statistical information:

• Number of unique visitors per day.
• Percentage of traffic generated by each page.
• Summaries on monthly and annual basis.

These tools are Urchin, and Webalyzer and Awstats that are open source. The first does not distinguish between visits from people from those of robots, from search engines mainly, and therefore provide inflated data.

Online statistical services require that you install JavaScript code on each page. They provide these data:

• Number of visitors on a real graph.
• Bounce factor.
• Traffic of most often seen pages.

The values this time are under-valued, because all Internet users do not activate JavaScript code, and secondly, on a site built manually, not all pages include the code. The major online service is Analytics.
Whether online or provided by the server, these tools generally indicate:

• The average time spent for a visitor.
• The geographical distribution of visitors
• The parts of direct access and search engines.

All these data can be described as "statistical results". The webmaster may also need data on the Web in general to guide the site's contents.

To find out what issues are relevant on Internet, you could attempt to know the keywords that are most often sought. Google shares the content provided by its search engine, Trends, gives the evolution and geographical searches.
A similar service, Google suggest, when you type a keyword gives you a list of similar words and demand for each. It is now added to the interface of the search engine.

Best statistics services and tools

To have all the stats needed on your website, here is a list of tools...

Demo of stats with Piwik

• Webalizer
  Statistical server side software that displays in HTML statistics from the logs.
• Awstats
  A server-side tool that works in CGI or command line and producs tables from the logs like Webalizer. Is writen in Perl.
• Google Analytics. Client side tool with JavaScript code to include. To find out what happens once the visitor arrives on your site. Complete statistical reports, including bounce factor, mean time on the site, percents of clicks on links in a page. A JavaScript code must be inserted in each page.
  Note the Urchin software which is the basis of this tool is no longer provided by Google.
• Matamo
  Open source alternative to Analytics, provides extensive analysis including for ecommerce, in real time (unlike Awstats and Webalizer). Panels fit in one page, as shows the picture above. It uses JavaScript but the backend is on your server thanks to a PHP and MySQL tool. Successor to PHPMyVisites. Requires PHP and MySQL. A JavaScript code must be inserted on each page.
• Analytics.js
  JavaScript library to analyze everything that happens on your site. For example, the number of visitors who fill out a form ... You have just to add a hook to each action. Server side.
• ClickHeat. How and where visitors clic in your pages. Require a JavaScript code, PHP and a database.
  

See also

• List of services and tools for the webmaster.
• Statistics about webmasters. Services used and coding practices.