Tags for this article: software, traffic, web analytics, website
If your business is totally dependent on the websites for generating revenues or more business, then it becomes extremely important for you to know exactly how everything is working and what your websites are doing. This means that you not only need to track your website but also measure the total effectiveness of your website. You can make use of either the spreadsheets or the log files for measuring the success of your website. There are software solutions available that integrate perfectly with your servers or some of the log analysis tool that come with the hosting packages.
It is a common thought by almost all the small business owners that the software installed on their local machines is the only solution they have for web analytics. But the fact is that there are tools which are hosted at the outside site and web analytics tool that are placed directly on your web servers. There are both the hosted as well as the server solutions available with each one having their own advantages. The main advantage of the server solutions being that they offer a greater flexibility and the hosted solutions are maintained outside or by someone else. You will need a solution on your web servers or for that matter hard drive if your main intention is to keep all your statistics a secret.
Whenever you select any web analytics tools it is very important that it should incorporate certain standard reports such as referrers, pageviews, visits and unique visits, HTTP errors, robots, entry as well as exit pages, countries, domains, operating systems, web browsers and authenticated users. Besides these standard reports there should also be an option wherein you can create your customised reports for getting the analytics of any specific area.
One of the most common methods adopted by any web analytics package to tack any web pages is to tag each and every page with a unique identifier. This way with the help of these tags the tools will have more accurate information about the pages that are being displayed and requested for. But for ensuring this you would need a tag assigned to each page. Another method of achieving good analytics would be by setting cookies for each customer that visits the site. This would enable the tools to have much better vision and information about the browsers that visit the site which would also include the unique visitors along with the information about the session lengths.
The two most important aspects of web analytics are flexibility and scalability. The more custom reports generated by you, the better for you as you will be able to generate and get more information out of it. In order to get maximum out of your tool, you should be able to find the one that is able to provide maximum support. The next important thing to be considered is the total cost that would be involved. To avoid any kind of problems later always remember to include recurring costs into your decision.