One of the most important aspects of managing a website are the statistics, ie, traffic analysis of our website. If we do not know where traffic is coming or that is what most visitors to our users is difficult to measure the effect of your work. The statistical analysis is essential for decision making on various initiatives related to our website.

There are several software options to analyze the statistics of a website, they provide us with information on number of users, hits, pages viewed, files downloaded, transfer or bandwidth used, etc. .. This is already part of a specific jargon statistical analysis of web pages, with specific terms of web traffic analysis and that can sometimes be confusing. But this will be explained in detail below.

Normally any web hosting plan comes with software already installed that show you statistics of your website. These are the most common options for statistical analysis:

Remote monitoring services

It is the easiest to install and thus the most popular. All information is stored on a remote server which you can access to see your stats. Just install a small script on your website. Some require you to put a small image on your website for the service, others, like the new Google Analytics require that you have a user account. Here are some examples:

Google Analytics http://www.google.com/analytics/
StatCounter http://www.statcounter.com/
Sitemeter http://www.sitemeter.com
Extreme http://www.extreme-dm.com/tracking/

Logging scripts

This is a script you install on your server and generates reports based on the logs (which are files in which information is collected on visits with the pages of a website) that creates the server. The trouble is that in this case you have to keep those logs and if your site has a lot of traffic these logs can become quite large.

http://www.xav.com/scripts/axs/

http://www.ekstreme.com/phplabs/phpcounter.php

Log analysis programs

These are programs that analyze your server logs and generate reports. Some of these programs come pre-installed on your web hosting service, which will greatly facilitate things. The quality and ability to customize these reports depends on the characteristics of each.

AwStats http://www.awstats.org/
Webalizer http://www.webalizer.com