How Do I Monitor My Website Progress?

the company i use for my hosting recommend awstats i have used it on all my sites and its free

Out of curiosuty, why wouldn't you use google analytics? It the market leader, beats every analytics package hands down, and is also free

I may be wrong, but I think awstats uses server logs which is an old and misleading way of viewing stats. Like the bad old days when people used to say "I get xyz hits" Reality is, a hit can be a page element loading. We average 14 hits to each unique visitor. It sounds great from a marketing big number point of view, but can be misleading.

AWStats shows loads of info including unique visitors. I have always used these figures and not Google analytics.

I am not aware of any proof existing that GA is superior over anything else, apart from hearsay but anyway, 99% of the hosting population, the actual website owners ARE RARELY GIVEN THEIR WEB HOSTING LOGIN......NOW ARE THEY??!! so they would think GA is the beez kneez simply because that's usually the only easily accessible one to average Joe, and the web designers shove that on their website so they surely then have no reason to give them hosting login access.

PS I've been ignoring the word 'hits' for years! The word makes me cringe when people say they'd have 10,000 hits this week!

lol, Indizine is back in da house

I remember sometime ago now comparing my server stats and GA ones, and the "unique visitors" claimed by my server stats was way over the GA ones, they weren't even close, and will confess to using these ones for the first few years when people asked about our traffic numbers. When we first started, for analysis we used a paid analytical solution, and that didn't tally up with server stats either, then GA came of age and offered more functionality, but for free.

These days, with the way we can track adsense revenue, adwords, inbound keywords etc, etc, then I can't imagine life without GA. (and now we do quote GA numbers )

I guess it like bathroom scales, if you use different ones, you can always shed a few pounds between different scales. But if you want to lose weight, you need to stick to the same scales, regardless of what the actual reading is

I wouldn't recommend using AWstats or any server based monitoring tools because the numbers can be very misleading for a few reasons:

1. Awstats will count search engine bots that can greatly increase your perceived hits (possibly 100's per day)
2. Awstats will run based on your server time where as something like GA will base stats off of your time zone.
3. GA will not count visitors that don't have javascript enabled (which is very rare nowadays) or visitors that close before the javascript has loaded.

Not to mention the advanced stuff that you can do with GA like look at browsers, resolutions and monitor split tests!

There are various parameters to monitor the website progress. The first one is by checking the cPanel stats. If you have access to cPanel, you can check the traffic activity on your website and plan the SEO strategies accordingly. Secondly monitoring the keywords also ensures website progress. If your keywords are doing well and if the rankings are improving, your website is making progress. Moreover you can also check the Alexa ranking of your website, this is also a great platform for analyzing the incoming traffic to the website.

I believe Cpanel stats are just pulled from the server logs, so do you advocate server stats over Google Analytics?

Just curious as you are a hosting provider.

If you have opted for a hosting account that provides with a cPanel or Plesk control panel, it will become easier for you to maintain a track record of your website. In cPanel you can check the AWStats of the website that provides with a complete overview of the incoming traffic to the website, along with the unique visitors. You can also check website traffic related information in Alexa.

I don't want to jump into an argument but I use Google Analytics for all my sites and every client site I manage and find the data they serve up to be far more accurate than awstats, just my opinion after running split tests.

KISSmetrics is pretty new but looks very good though it isn't free, it does give some excellent stats.