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How many viewing your site?

Dal123

Dal123

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Oct 23, 2008
903
0
England
My site is coming on nicely now and really I should be knowing how many people are viewing my site and if it's going well. However I don't really want a hits tracker thingy (not sure on the technical name :eek:). But thought maybe an option to hide it on the page. Then read this article and there are others able to tell you how much traffic etc http://kb.siteground.com/article/How_do_I_see_how_many_hits_per_day_Im_receiving.html
What does everyone else do about this?
I'm a little concerned as I think my site is about 80MB has lots of images of previous work and these are important. Then I thought I don't really understand how it all works.
When someone clicks my link from googl (not pay per click or advert, just simple listing) does that automatically download the whole site, or does it just download my index page? I'm using lightbox 2 which displays the specific folder of previous jobs so will it download just the thumbnail images (10kb each) or will it download the source images too (1.5mb each :eek:). Not sure what bandwith to get too and know very little about hosting so need to research this more but not quite at that stage yet.
:)
 
I've been using AWstats for years and I like it well enough (haven't shopped around much). I don't feel it's perfect, but gives me some basic stats. I find the search terms and phrases listing (that people use in search engines to find your page) to be some of the more interesting stuff. The amount of time spent at the site is also good to know, though not sure how accurate it is. It seems a lot of people are using Google Analytics these days, though I haven't gotten around to really checking it out, though I am setup with their webmaster tools.

When someone gets to your site from Google (which is the same as when they type in the URL for a specific page) they visitor's browser will download the entire page (not site). With lightbox 2, if it's pre-loading the full size images (which I believe it does), then yes, they'll be downloading quite a bit if you have a lot on a page.
 
I've been using Google Analytics. The nice thing about it (besides being free) is that it is simple to set-up. It does not give you all the info that some other packages do, but if you just want to know the volume of traffic, which pages are more popular, and where the traffic is coming from, it does a good job.
 
angelwatt said:
I've been using AWstats for years and I like it well enough (haven't shopped around much). I don't feel it's perfect, but gives me some basic stats. I find the search terms and phrases listing (that people use in search engines to find your page) to be some of the more interesting stuff. The amount of time spent at the site is also good to know, though not sure how accurate it is. It seems a lot of people are using Google Analytics these days, though I haven't gotten around to really checking it out, though I am setup with their webmaster tools.

When someone gets to your site from Google (which is the same as when they type in the URL for a specific page) they visitor's browser will download the entire page (not site). With lightbox 2, if it's pre-loading the full size images (which I believe it does), then yes, they'll be downloading quite a bit if you have a lot on a page.
Click to expand...


i also have AWstats installed on my webserver. i like it
 
I use Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) mostly because I develop Flash sites. Works great on blogs and custom html sites I have done too.

In any case I would highly suggest GA or Clicky (http://getclicky.com/) over anything built in, anything in that article and "One click install" software through your web host. If you are using AWStats and switch to either of these you will never look back. Plus I am pretty sure you can run AWStats, GA and Clicky at the same time and see how you like it.

Also check out http://crazyegg.com for gathering other sorts of metrics.
 
I've used both AWStats and Google Analytics. They're both pretty useful. Google Analytics has a cleaner interface and it's easier to use, but has the drawback of having to rely on Javascript embedded in each page you need to track. If you're looking for a free product that's easy to use and works no matter where your site is parked, go with Google. However, if you don't want to have to add in another component on your pages and/or want something a little more reliable, I'd go with AWStats or a similar server side option.
 
memco said:
Google Analytics has a cleaner interface and it's easier to use, but has the drawback of having to rely on Javascript embedded in each page you need to track.
Click to expand...

That has been the main reason I haven't tried it. As an adamant user of NoScript I don't wanted my stats to be screwed from those kinds of users.
 
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