How to track the traffic

[mikel]

I am looking for some kind of book or website which has some kind of tip on tracking the traffic and keeping a report. Any suggestions?

[agerhart]

Mikel,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

This is the web site where you can learn how to track traffic and report it.

You will find numerous discussions regarding the various programs and tools that are available to streamline the tracking and reporting process.

I would suggest you begin reading through this forum right here, or use the "Site Search" at the top of the page.

Good Luck!

[cfel2000]

Try Webtrends or Webtrends Live

[unknownsoldier]

More web analytic statistical packages than you can shake a stick at:here [uu.se]

Power to the consumer as the decision is yours :)

If ur a small business you should be able to get the information, you want for free with a little bit of trial and error.

If you are a big business and thinking about getting some new tracking - Good Luck there are a lot of sharks out there.

I did see a book just the other day that detailed just what you are talking about here, hmmmmm wheres that link?

[hayluke]

I'd recommend webtrends (you should be able to get a free trial of it from their site. I found it fairly easy to pick up and gives quite detailed results. You will need access to your site log files though..

This is just my opinion and I'm sure there are lots of other (better?) packages out there..

luke

[agerhart]

I'll second the nomination for WebTrends....and it is perfect if you are new to tracking and statistics.

[europeforvisitors]

I like FastStats Analyzer for its speed in processing logfiles, its clean interface, and certain information that it provides (e.g., which search engine referred visitors who searched on a word or phrase). But it's something of a nuisance to set up (you need different reports for daily stats, weekly stats, etc.) and it doesn't decompress .gz logfiles reliably. It also doesn't have a category for search spiders, as far as I can tell.

Sawmill has some nice features. I especially like the way you can just click on a day, a week, or a month to get stats for that time period. But it's very slow to process large files, the interface is a bit clumsy.

I haven't used WebTrends, but if it's anything like WebTrends Live, it's very user-friendly and appealing to the eye. WebTrends Live has its glitches, though--it often has trouble reading page titles, and I don't trust its results (which can differ greatly from the server logfiles).