When people visit your website, they’re actually visiting your server, so when you’re trying to analyze them, starting with your web server statistics is a great way to get started.

How do you get statistics out of your web server?
It’s really a simple concept, although some systems make the actual practice of analyzing your server statistics harder than others.

Each time someone visits your website, the visit typically logged into a file. That file is used to capture information about that particular request, like where it came from, what the visitor was requesting, what time, what type of browser they used, etc. That log file (which can become quite large, depending on how busy your site is) contains all the information you need to get started with web statistics.

The file itself is all text and not really designed for human consumption. I’ve included a picture of a raw logfile from this site. You can see that it’s hard to make heads or tails of the data that’s included.

Enter web statistics software. The software makes measuring easy by parsing the logs, grabbing the important information and outputting it into a much more human readable output. Most analysis software will put your info into easy-to-read graphs and charts, and slice and dice the data so that you can get a real good idea of what’s happening on your site.

These types of software are called Log Analyzers. They range from completely free to pretty expensive, and often times, you get what you pay for. Usually though, the information that comes out is the same … it’s just a matter of what features you’re looking for and how much data you need. If you’re just getting started and aren’t interested in spending much money, you might want to ask your hosting company about AWStats, Webalizer or ModLogAn. These are “free” softwares that they can put in place for you to help read your log files.

Now if you’re more advanced and are dying to tell me that Log Analyzers aren’t the only way to slice the pie, you are right. There are more advanced ways to analyze your website traffic, and I’m going to look into that on other pages of this site. But to get a new user started, Log Analysis is one of the most easy and cost effective ways to analyze traffic. It doesn’t require changes to any web pages and is often accessible through a page on the very same site.

What are the drawbacks? Log analyzers are somewhat limited. They only capture the as much information as your server is logging, and most servers are only set to log the default data that I mentioned above: IP address, browser, what file they wanted, what time they came. It’s enough to paint a decent picture, but if you’re running a complex site, a shopping cart, or are using a coding language like PHP or ASP, you’ll eventually want to look into something like a javascript service that can give you more details about your user’s click habits.