Understanding your website’s traffic is a crucial part of enhancing your search engine optimization efforts. Knowing where most of your website’s traffic is originating from will allow you to place more emphasis on that traffic stream. For example if you know that most of your traffic is coming from YouTube, then you may want to increase your video marketing efforts. Likewise, you can focus more on the weaker sources of traffic to improve your overall outreach. Any online business owner should be well aware of their website’s traffic stats if they want their visitor base to grow. Many people opt to use expensive softwares to analyze stats. However this is not necessary, as most of the analytics needed can be found within your control panel which is provided by your web hosting provider.
cPanel Web Analytics
Since cPanel is by fare the most widely-used control panel around, we’ll use it as our primary example of how a control panel can provide all of the website traffic statistics needed. cPanel includes three analytic tools; Analog, AwStats and Webalizer. When you first discover these tools they can be a bit difficult to use, however as you begin to explore the various features, you’ll soon learn just how simple they are to use. To help you get started using these tools we have included a quick overview of each one.
Analog
Out of the three tools offered by cPanel, Analog is the most advanced. The analytic results offered by Analog are presented in text from, instead of in graphs. However, all of the information you’ll need to improve your website’s traffic flow can be found in Analog. Although this tool has a relatively steep learning curve, learning to use it will improve your site’s performance greatly.
AwStats and Webalizer
The second most advanced tool offered by control panel is AwStats. Although it provides detailed analytical information, it also presents this information in easy to understand charts and graphs. With AwStats, you can analyze statistics concerning email, media viewing and even File Transfer Protocol. This tool also let’s you create scheduled and requested reports via it’s simple user interface. You should use AwStats to setup weekly reports of your website’s traffic, and use Analog to analyze your daily traffic.
Webalizer provides statistical analysis on a monthly basis, giving you a broader understanding of your site’s long term stats. Like AwStats, Webalizer also presents information in very simple graphs and charts that anyone can understand. Although the stats provided by Webalizer are basic, they provide great insight to your site’s progression. I would not recommend using Webalizer as your sole means of understanding your website’s traffic though. It is best to use all three of these tools in combination to achieve optimal results.
It is important to note that all of these programs are included free with cPanel, and many other control panels include similar tools. You should remember this before you make the decision to purchase expensive web analytics software unnecessarily.
February 8th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
Analyzing website is a good and nice thought to find out something new and which is very helpful related to that website. but if we do extra analyze that it will be not good for us. it will give diverse effect to our body and result of this we we face so many health problem.