Some of the Most Popular Web Statistics Programs to Monitor Your Site

One of the most important things after your site is up and running is to monitor the success of your marketing efforts, for which you need a statistics program. The web statistics program allows you to monitor the activity of the visitors on your website. This important information can then be used to calculate the return on investment ROI for your web business. A great variety of web statistics programs are offered by a multitude of companies, each having its own pros and cons. When using a particular statistics program, you should never expect 100% accuracy from it. We have conducted a survey on some of the most popular statistics programs, i.e. those that give you the highest possible accuracy.

One of the most popular statistics program that monitors the usage of your web server is Analog. It gives you in-depth information about your website including the pages most commonly accessed by visitors, the geographical location of your site's visitors and a whole lot more. The best thing about Analog is not only that it is popular, but it costs you nothing to deploy it on your website. The program can be downloaded for free from www.analog.cx. Another big plus point for Analog is that it is multilingual. If you use one of the 33 different languages supported by Analog, you can easily understand the software and put it to use on your site. If your website receives plenty of traffic, it may become difficult for a web statistics program to monitor and record all the activity going on on your server. However, this is not at all a problem for Analog, thanks to its super fast speed and its compression and processing features. Analog supports not only Linux hosting and Windows hosting, but also a great variety of other server platforms. It is extremely easy to install and use, and is ideal for a web development environment.

A major competitor to the Analog program is AWStats. Similar to Analog, it is also an open-source application. You can download it for free at awstats.sourceforge.net and install it on your website. AWStats is also available in a variety of languages and is an excellent gadget to monitor online services such as streaming media, e-mail as well as FTP servers. All the information you need to develop an action in order to improve the return on investment of your website is right on your fingertips with AWStats. Not only you can know the attributes of the visitors accessing your website pages, you can also find out the exact search engine the visitor used in order to arrive at your website. You can also take a peek into the most popular pages of your site, the exact time of the day that a visitor arrives on your website and a whole lot interesting as well as actionable information. One downside of AWStats is that in order to configure the software properly and to analyze the reports, you need to be knowledgeable from business as well as technical point of view. However, because of the popularity of AWStats, it is easy to get help from other users on Internet forums who are often discussing the installation and usage of the software.

Number three down the line is Webalizer, a popular and fast statistics program. The software has its own way of presenting the important information stored on your web server. It not only shows you the total number of hits and visits, but also the referrers as well as the country of origin of the visitors. You can also see the total bandwidth consumed by your website visitors. Another excellent feature is that it also presents the statistics in a timewise manner, i.e. per day, per hour, or per month usage. No matter how large the access data of your website is, Webalizer can give you all the information without having to wait for a long time. Webalizer can also be downloaded for free at www.webalizer.org. Similar to Analog and AWStats, the Webalizer software is also available in 30 different languages, which makes it a truly global choice. Depending on your skill levels, you can use the Webalizer package either in a commandline mode or by using a configuration file.

Urchin, like the three web statistics programs mentioned above, was another popular statistics package which was being used by the Fortune 500 companies. The recent acquisition of the software by Google has made it a paid product. However, if you want to get a feel of the statistical and analytical capabilities of the software, you can sign up for Google analytics. A major advantage of Urchin is that you can monitor the statistics of more than one website with this program. Not only you can find out the incoming path of your visitors, you can also know the usage of your webpages along with conversion statistics. The analytical capabilities of the software are however much more broader than this, and you can have an idea of that only after using the software for some time. The user interface of Urchin is extremely easy to use and you can expect to get the exact results you are seeking for your website.

Having said all this, it is up to you the potential user to decide which web statistics program would be suitable for your personal needs. As far as the three free web statistics programs mentioned above are concerned, you can try out any or all of them because they are all available for free. If you want to try out the Urchin software, it is advisable that you first sign up for Google analytics. Then, if you think that the software does the job for you, you can subscribe to the paid version of Urchin from Google.

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