Hi All

Just signed up here.

Can anyone reccommend a tool to use for monitoring my web traffic. I have recently setup a site - www.themouthpiece.com - and have been amazed at the response I have received. I want to capitalise on this success and build for the future and as such it would be good to know a little more about who has visited, from where, when, how many times etc.

My web host does provide some information, well a lot of info really but I have no idea as to how to interpret that info!!! Also, when I see stats from different sites posted in various forums I am a member of, they don't look anything like the figures I get from my web host.

So, where do I start? I would like to know things like:

How many unique visitors
How many total visitors
How many page requests

et al....

Can anyone advise please...

Thanks
John

Getting this information will all depend on what your host is providing. Until you have worked out all the details of that, I woud suggest signing up at http://www.sitemeter.com. If you get their JavaScript code and place it on every page on your site, you will be given an accurate count of both unique visitors and pageviews. There are other options such as getting the stats e-mailed to you regularly and reports on referring sites.

It's certainly a good place for a start.

Once you've got that set up, you can look into what your host is providing to see if it's better. Many hosts will install a program such as Webalizer, which will analyse the visits to your site and give you nice statistics and graphs.

If they don't offer this they may have downloadable stats. These will be a massive file will details of every visitor. You can either download these and then process them using a program such as Analog (http://www.analog.cx/) or process them with a script online (like AWStats or Webalizer). Some hosts won't like you processing online, though, as it creates massive server load.

Another option is that your host provides a downloadable stats file with uniques and pageviews for each day listed. This is very limited, and is about the best you can get from the file, so if this is what your host does, I would suggest relying on Sitemeter.

One final point, it is almost impossible to compare different logfile/stats analysers because they all use different algorithms. For example, 1,000 uniques on Sitemeter isn't the same as 1,000 uniques on Webalizer.

check out http://www.visitorville.com it's a new stats program that show real time traffic and has a built in chat feature so you can chat with your users. i love it and it not like those other programs.

I used ezBoo on mysite. Its a PHP scripts that uses MySQL. However, when the database grew very big (9MB++), it causes my site to load very2 slow. Now, I'm writing my own script to log the traffic... any body interested to try my script out? well its far from perfect but at least I know really how many people comes in and each visitor what are the pages they viewed and at what time. Referer, for each referer host, how many URLs were refered to.

Just to share.