All webmasters need to know what kind of traffic their web sites are getting. The choices to keep tabs on site statistics are varied, but there’s three that are completely free and among the most widely used: Awstats, Sitemeter, and Google Analytics. Awstats is a program written in perl for all platforms, while both Sitemeter and Google Analytics are web-based tools requiring no installation.
Image by Christian Ferrari
If you don’t run your own server, and your hosting company doesn’t provide Awstats pre-installed, it isn’t going to be your solution and you’ll have to use one of the web-based services instead. If you do have a shell account but are too intimidated to do anything that involves typing commands into a non-graphical interface, then once again stick to the web-based options. If you’re looking for the most comprehensive statistics, Awstats does generate the most in-depth reports for a single site. Awstats needs to be set-up as a daily recurring job (crontab in Linux/Unix servers), and uses your server’s log files. It supports Apache style logs as well as those produce by IIS (Windows) and even parses and produces statistics from mail logs. You run an interactive non-GUI configuration script to install Awstats on your server. If you want to get more sophisticated geographical statistics, you’ll need to install one of the geo plugins (perl modules, in reality) and the corresponding database. MaxMind offers its free geoip database and perl module. Because Awstats uses your web server’s logs, it won’t have any statistical holes such as can happen with web-based services. With a web-based service, the visitor’s browser could fail to download the javascript, either accidentally or by filtering it out, that is needed to report the user’s activity back to the stats provider’s site. Awstats can also give you statistics on the many robots that visited your site, whereas a web-based tracker can’t provide such data since spiders don’t download javascript files, let alone interpret them.
Sitemeter has been around for many years and until Google Analytics came along, it was the favorite statistical tool used by hundreds of thousands of bloggers. All you have to do to get this free service is to sign-up on their site and then paste a bit of javascript in your site’s footer, so that accesses to all pages get metered. Each account you open can only cover one site, thus if you have ten sites, you’ll have to register ten times. To view your sites’ statistics, you have to log-in to their web site. Once there you can view details on the most recent activity on your site. Statistics for previous days or months are limited to totals. A lot of the other statistics are limited to the last 100 visitors to your site. Thus, you can see that someone from Japan visited recently, but you can’t tell how many Japanese visited in the last hour, day or week. You can get enhanced statistics only by upgrading to a more advanced plan, which of course involves a monthly payment. Apart from these limitations, Sitemeter has been frequently criticized for throwing a copious number of tracking cookies at your site’s visitors on behalf of an advertiser, SpecificClick.net.
Google is the most trusted entity on the Internet, and thus it’s no surprise that its Analytics service has quickly become the main site traffic tracking tool used by most sites. Analytics requires that you register for a Google mail account and paste a bit of javascript into your site’s footer, similar to Sitemeter. You view your accumulated statistics via their web site, also like Sitemeter. The major difference between Analytics and Sitemeter, is that you can access all your web sites’ statistics via the same interface, whereas Sitemeter requires a different log-in for each. Having everything in one place is a great convenience. Analytics gives you every feature up front and free. No need to buy an upgrade. You can review detailed statistics for any date or date range, even well in the past, something that’s not possible with Sitemeter’s free plan. There is one drawback to Analytics, although it’s rather insignificant: statistics are compiled only once a day. Sitemeter allows you to see the latest activity, but the truth is, that’s not so useful except to determine if there’s any problem with your site. Many big name sites use Google Analytics.
To resume, a statistical compiler such as Awstats is a lot more complicated to set-up, but does provide the most reliable and complete data. On the other hand, web-based statistical sites are extremely easy to set-up and use, but can’t provide stats on anything that isn’t a web page, such as images, flash, or Java applets, and also can’t keep track of accesses by web crawlers. The best option among the web-based stats services is Google Analytics. However, if you have a site with a lot of traffic and need hard core traffic reports, use Awstats. You can still use Google Analytics as a secondary source of statistics.
If you also need to have a credible external audit of your site’s traffic, perhaps to show the public, the competition, or a potential buyer that you’re a serious contender, you’ll have to use a reputable web-based auditing service for this. You can sign-up for a free account at Quancast, or pay hefty fees to services like Nielsen, comScore or Compete. Typically, you’ll have to paste some javascript into your site’s footer. Hopefully, such code won’t clash with your Analytics or Sitemeter javascript, but if you really need an an audit service, it’s worth switching to using Awstats for your internal traffic reports.
