Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

September 09, 2009

cPanel and Web Analytics

Now more than ever, it is absolutely critical to understand the habits of your visitors.  You need to know how many visitors are coming to your website, where those visitors originate from, and how they spend their time on your site.  The details you obtain from such analysis can provide you with valuable insight that goes a long way improving site performance.  If you are serious about generating traffic and maintaining a consistent flow of visitors, analyzing your web stats is something that should be done on a regular basis.  Although web analytic software and service solutions can be very expensive, some of the best tools are completely free to use.  You just may have several included in your web hosting package.

cPanel is the most popular control panel on the web hosting market.  The software comes equipped with a host of great features and this includes a suite of web analytic tools that are built into the panel.  Three applications you will generally find in cPanel are Analog, AwStats and Webalizer.  While they may be a little intimidating on first glance, in due time, you will discover that they are easy to use and can work wonders at improving the performance of your site.

Webalizer

Webalizer is a statistical program that makes it simple to find out how many people are visiting your site on a month by month basis.  This is done by presenting colorful table charts and graphs that are straightforward and easy to read.  Because these are basic stats, you can take a quick glance and gather some rather valuable information about your website.  Though very useful, you may want to refer to Analog or AwStats to get more detailed information.

AwStats

AwStats is an open-source application that is both powerful and easy to use.  Similar to Webalizer, it presents statistics of your website in easy to read tables and graphs.  However, it is slightly more advanced as it provides you with details on services such as mail, streaming media and FTP.  With AwStats, static reports can be created via command line interface while on-demand reporting is available through a browser-based CGI program.

Analog

Analog is a more advanced web stat tool offering a style of presentation that differs greatly from both AwStats and Webalizer.  Unlike the other options which offer graphs, this one mainly presents information in the form of text, thus requiring you to pay close attention to the details.  With that said, all the vital information regarding your visitors that you will want to view are exclusively found in Analog.  While many find it more difficult to use, making yourself familiar with this tool is essential if you truly want to access your traffic stats.

If cPanel is your control panel, then you probably have a suite of tools that will allow you to effectively analyze traffic and use that knowledge to bring more traffic to your site.  Each are great individually but when used together, they can be just as, if not more valuable than a high-end solution.

Tags: web analytic tools,  traffic stats,  cPanel Tutorials,  AwStats,  analog,  website visitors,  website traffic,  webalizer