Tracking Website Traffic

Certainly hit counters are one way to track website traffic, but they are about as archaic a way as an abacus would be at calculating your taxes. For one, hit counters only track hits to the page the counter is on, and they will track all hits to that page, including when you visit your own page yourself and when others refresh your page or return for subsequent visits. This makes them an extremely inaccurate indicator of the unique traffic reaching your web pages.

Alternatively, there are three other tools—all included in the cPanel control panel—that are far more accurate and effective than hit counters, each of which can help you tremendously in learning all you can about your site's traffic, so that you can then optimize your marketing efforts and maximize your results. They are as follows:

This is a web-based tool for analyzing your site's log files. You can custom configure the webalizer to report on precisely those statistics that matter most to you, such as number of hits, referrers of all visitors, the countries of origin for each hit, and the quantity of data each one downloaded.

The Webalizer is a feature-rich program that supports unlimited log file sizes, multiple languages, and partial logs. The Webalizer composes detailed HTML usage reports that can be viewed on any web browser. This is by far the most advanced and comprehensive of the three website traffic tracking utilities listed here, with charts, graphs, and more.

These are records of all the hit activity to a particular website, including the path each visitor takes from one page to another through your site. No charts, graphs, or other graphics are involved in using raw access logs to track website traffic. You can download your site's server access logs to your desktop as a zip file. You can also set your Raw Log Manager to regularly archive the information compiled in your home directory, as well as delete it when you are through reviewing it.

To be useful, however, you should have a preferred reporting tool capable of analyzing the information contained in these logs according to your specifications. Raw access logs can also be helpful in identifying website abusers, such as those visitors accessing web pages they're not supposed to.

This tool delivers a basic summary of all visitors to your site, including exactly who has accessed your website each month. While more simplistic than the preceding two tools in its capabilities, it is the fastest and easiest way to quickly discover who is visiting your site and how they arrived there.

Back Tips & Tools