Traffic Analysis Program for your Websites

Being able to monitor web traffic to your sites is very important. You want to be able to gather metrics like where are users are being referred from, how long users stay on your site, what ads are working or not. Being able to gather statistics helps you find out what types of things are working and helps you adapt and build content users enjoy.

There are several very expensive web statistics packages that do a great job, but there are also plenty of free tools out there that do very well.

Here we've compiled a list of some of favorites:

SiteMeter and Statcounter:

These are probably the most popular of web analytics software on the internet. I use sitemeter since it reporting is nice and you have the option of letting visitors view your web stats. This is useful when you want a trusted 3rd party to show your users how much traffic your site is getting.

Both help you track where the users are coming from, what keywords they have used in the search engines, how long they stayed on your site, and what part of the world they are coming from.

103 bees: This tools helps you track what keywords or search phrases users are typing in to search engines to reach you. It helps optimize your site for keywords.

Google Analytics A classic web analytics package. With Google Analytics, you can also invite users to view your site statistics in read-only mode, have daily reports sent to your email.
Some other nice features include the ability to preserves historical analytics data that you can use to compare marketing campaigns effectiveness over time.

Awstats: An open source tool that tracks non-real time data. The advantage is that you don't have to paste any javascript or other code snippets into your website. It help track many of the same things as the above mentioned programs as well as some additional things like bandwidth usage and link backs.

Pheedo: A service like Feedburner that allows tracking of subscriptions, but Pheedo in addition has some nice built-in ad modules that allow you to insert google like ads into RSS feeds. A good alternative to Feedburner.

In conclusion most webmasters will not use any one of these tools. Good webmasters will choose a combination of tools to track and gather stats on how people are using their sites. Better metrics allow you to be able to manage change more effectively. As someone once told me "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it".

Feel free to add some of your favorite tools.
Special thanks to http://www.labnol.org for listing some of their favorite tools which I've borrowed.

Skooliki
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http://www.outervillage.com
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