Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Tracking Visitors

As a website owner, you’ll try a lot of different tactics to promote your site. Naturally, some will work while others won’t—and you need to keep the good strategies and prune those that fail. To do this successfully, you need a way to assess how your site performs.

Almost every web hosting company (except free web hosts) gives you some way to track the number of visitors to your site (see Figure 11-9). Ask your host how to use these tools. Usually, you need to log on to a “Control Panel” or “My Account” section of your host’s site. You’ll see a variety of options there; look for an icon labeled “Site Counters” or “Web Traffic.”

Figure 11-9. This Brinkster Page View Summary shows the number of hits (page requests) received on a given day. The chart below this summary (not shown) details the total number of bytes of information downloaded from your site. It’s important to realize that a “hit” is defined as a request for any page. If a single visitor travels around your website, requesting several pages, they generate several hits. To find out how many unique visitors you have, you need to use a separate log analysis program, described below.

With more high-end hosting services, you often have more options for viewing your site’s traffic statistics. Some hosts provide the raw web server logs, which store detailed, blow-by-blow information about every one of your visitors. ...