Understanding Your Web Site Traffic - July 2003
By Kelly Embleton

Now, more than ever, businesses view their Web sites as a way to communicate with their customers and expand their business. Understanding your business Web site traffic can be very important to you and your business. You have probably spent a lot of time and money on advertising campaigns, search engine submission, link posting, Web site design and more to attract visitors to your site and earn revenue. Wouldn't it be nice to receive Web site statistics, actually understand what it all means and find out what is working and not working for your site and business.

Many analysis and stat programs rely and obtain information from the log files found on your server from your site visitors. Whenever a visitor enters your site they leave pieces of information behind. This information is then logged in your log files. When your analysis and stat program is run it goes through the log files and produces the results to you in the program interface in an easy to understand format.

Some of the most common statistics and information that analysis and stat programs pick up are:

• How many unique visitors your site receives every day, week, month, year
• Number of page views
• Number of hits
• Where your visitors are coming from (other sites)
• Which pages are the most entered
• Which pages are most visitors exiting from
• Most popular keywords visitors used to find your site
• How long visitors stay on your site
• Which browser the visitors are using
• Screen resolutions
• Countries visitors are from
• If the visitors have cookies enabled and much more

Below are a few of the most commonly used Web site Statistic Programs:

WebSTAT - www.webstat.com
This site is a comprehensive, easy to use, easy to setup Web traffic analysis service. It can be used with any Web site. It requires minimal HTML experience so that anyone with access to their Web site pages can be up and running within a few minutes.

http-analyze - www.http-analyze.org
http-analyze is a Web Log Analyzer for Web servers. It analyzes the transfer log file of your Web server and creates a comprehensive summary report from the information found there. The site has been optimized to process large log files as fast as possible.

Webalizer - www.mrunix.com/webalizer/
The Webalizer is a fast, free Web server log file analysis program. It produces highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in HTML format, for viewing with a standard Web browser.

WebTrends - www.netiq.com/products/log/default.asp
WebTrends Log Analyzer is a fast, powerful, real-time Web Log Analyzer that will provide you with valuable information about your Web site and the users that access it. Reports generated by WebTrends Log Analyzer include statistical information as well as colourful graphs that show usage, trends, market share and much more.

Urchin - www.urchin.com
The Urchin Web log Analyzer is an easy to use Web log analysis and reporting tool. Urchin installs directly on your server and creates HTML-based graphical reports of your Web server traffic. It offers several special features such as multi-language reporting, Virtual Sub hosting support, and even e-commerce log reporting.

Most Web hosts suggest or supply Web site analysis and statistic programs to you. If they don't supply or suggest some, there are a ton of scripts available that you can purchase or download.

Resources

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• The Musicians-Resource.com Web site was built with the idea in mind that musicians could come there to find information on anything relating to music or the music industry itself. While visiting this site at www.musicians-resource.com, you can find links to bands, musicians, clubs, stores and more! If you would like to submit yourself, your band or your business, you can for free!

• Musiciansnews.com is a news Web site by musicians for musicians. You can find information about new CD releases, artists, bands, sheet music, music theory, articles and anything else that might interest a musician. Visit this site at www.musiciansnews.com.

• The purpose of Bandfamilytree.com is for all musicians of all levels throughout the world to be able to record their playing history, share experiences and details for Web site visitors to see. You are able to enter details of all the bands you have played with and list all your achievements over the years. Visit www.bandfamilytree.com.

• The 24th edition of the Montréal Jazz Festival will be held in Montréal on June 26 to July 6, 2003. Altogether, there will be 350 free concerts divided into 20 different series, surpassing all national and cultural boundaries with the truly international language of music. For all the details about the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal, visit www.montrealjazzfest.com.

• Music Books Plus is your best source on the Net for music and audio books, videos, CD-ROMs, DVDs, audio cassettes, software, posters, sound effects and apparel. Music Books Plus offers over 6,000 titles on the areas of: Music Business, Instrument Instruction, Audio and Video Production, Recording, Lighting and much more. To add to that, they also have new titles regularly, monthly specials, free monthly e-newsletters, free downloadable updates and flyers. Stop by today at www.musicbooksplus.com.