Number Crunching - What Stats Software to Use?

Posted by David | Filed under Web Software

It’s always nice to know when you create a website who is using it, why, how they got there and how long they spent! Its a great way though to learn about what your visitors are searching for and how to get more by exploiting this information to your advantage. The first thing though is to collect some comprehensive statistics for your website, and there are many many solutions to this problem. In this article I am going to go through three ways you can collect statistics, all of which I use currently, in fact at the same time in many cases!

Firstly, many shared server hosts install something called cPanel on to your website, this often has an Awstats module installed which can allow you to view your site statistics.

For those using WordPress there is also many plugins available for statistics but my favourite currently is one called StatPress

Finally for those of you who don’t want anything complicated, and perhaps one of the best is Google Analytics.

Awstats

Awstats is a great little feature often found in cPanel. It gives you a wide range of information about your users for everything on your server, from the top file, to top users, top search referrals etc. The best thing about Awstats is just the huge amount of information it places in front of you.

Unfortunately Awstats doesn’t lay out this information very well, its all on one big page, and for a less experienced web user could be hard to decipher. For those of you who don’t want anything fancy - Awstats is your no thrills Statistics software.

Verdict: 7/10

StatPress WordPress Plugin

Easy to install like many WordPress plugins StatPress gives a good amount of information, not quite as much as Awstats but perhaps to many people more relevant as it concerns their WordPress blog only. It includes all the useful information such as search engine referrals, users visited, operating system and other information, but it also has a really useful “Spy” feature which allows you to see exactly where the user landed on your website when they searched for it or came to it, and then what they did once arriving - it allows you to anonymously “profile” your users and see what their behaviour is like as they roam through your site - where they go, what attracts there attention and for how long. You can then use this information to see where your site weaknesses are and where its strengths lie.

Overall StatPress provides less but more interesting and more relevant statistical information than Awstats, its unfortunate for non WordPress users it is only a WordPress plugin.

Verdict: 8.5/10

Google Analytics

This is one of my favourites, and is great for everyone, regardless of whether your website is made in HTML or PHP. When you sign up to Google Analytics you are given a small piece of code to place into the header of your website page(s). Google then starts collecting the statistics!

What’s really good about this software, and sets it apart from the rest is that it can display the information it receives in a useful manner. It manipulates some of the statistics into graphs and charts, for example country information is processed onto a World Map where the deeper the colour the more visitors you receive from that country.

Like other statistics software it can tell you what search terms people use, but it’s able to tell you which are more effective, by telling you how long on average a person searching for a certain term stayed on your website and how many pages they looked at on average.  If you use Adsense as well Google can tell you how successful your Adsense terms are compared with other “Organic” Google searches.

Finally Google Analytics has the ability to overlay your statistics onto your site, so you can see which buttons or links are the most clicked in the most visual manner possible!

Verdict: 9/10

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