Trend Tracking

How to Measure Traffic on your Web Site

Hit Counters

The simplest way to add a "hit counter" to your Web page is to use the "dCounter" service from Infograph.net. You merely copy a snippet of HTML code to your page -- there's no need to set anything up on your server or install any special software. Click here to get a free counter for your site.

If you prefer to set up your own server code, Microsoft FrontPage provides a hit counter "webbot" that uses (and requires) FrontPage server-side extensions to count page visits.  It provides several graphics options (including the ability to define your own custom numerals).

Or, if you prefer not to use FrontPage server extensions, here are the details on how to set up a basic hit counter, using CGI.

Hit Lists

One of the many features added to Microsoft's Internet Information Server by "Windows NT Server 4.0 Option Pack" is the ability to log hits to the web server and access these logs remotely. In the absence of the more sophisticated tools listed below, this information can help you determine where a visit originate from, its time and duration, and, of course, what the visitors are looking at. The Option Pack is freely available for Windows NT Server at Microsoft's website: www.microsoft.com

Using the logs, we were able to determine the growth, trends and usage patterns here at PC Buyer's Guide and The Techno Zone. This information told us, for example, that the number of page views here has roughly doubled every week for the last four weeks  -- and, by extrapolating the latest numbers out to a month, it tells us that The Techno Zone is already serving over half the number of visitors that The Computer Paper's web site saw in its heyday in the first half of 1999. Thanks, visitors!

Trend Tracking

However, counting visits to your website is more than just counting "Hits." Indeed, if you hope to attract advertisers, you will need to gather information as detailed as possible on how long people spend at your site, where they come from, which page they visit first,  and so on. The following tools can help you collect that information and make sense of it.

• Name: WebTrends
• From: www.webtrends.com
• For: Windows PCs
• Price: US$299; free online version
• Summary: web site traffic analysis
• Pros: PC Magazine Editors' Choice. Real-Time Analysis, FastTrends Database, analyzes 40 million Hits a day, support & license for 500 Virtual Domains. Free unlimited technical support.
• Cons: The free version at WebTrendsLive.com does not provide details of hourly or first-time visitors or of what OS version number is visiting. WebTrendsLive provides these features, and several others for a monthly fee.

• Name: Advanced Web Statistics (AWStats)
• From: http://sourceforge.net/projects/awstats/
• For: Microsoft, Other OS, POSIX
• Price: Free (GPL)
• Summary: a free, powerful and feature-rich web server logfile analyzer that shows you all your Web (but also FTP or Mail) statistics including visits, unique visitors, pages, hits, hours, search engines, keywords, robots, etc. Requires Perl.

IISLog

Jay Little offers a free script called IISLog. It provides an ASP interface allowing you to quickly and easily query the iislog contents of an IIS server. It will also provide graphs detailing the levels of activity across various increments of time. IISLog is written in HTML/ASP/VbScript. You will also need Office 2000/XP installed on the web server in order to obtain the Office Web Component Libraries.

Linux, etc.

For webmasters running non-Microsoft platforms (Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, etc.), a free tool called Webalizer (www.mrunix.net/webalizer/) is a fast, free web server log file analysis program. It produces highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in HTML format, for viewing with a standard web browser.

One of the most intriguing tools we've seen for tracking visitors is VisualRoute, from www.visualroute.com. This program displays a map of wherever your IP packets travel to get from point to point, with details on the locations, internet service providers, addresses, even contact names. The scariest thing, as noted on the web page at http://home.earthlink.net/~leslemke/kgb1.htm, is how many of those packets in 1999 seemed to go through Fairfax, VA (rumored site of a secret U.S. government spy computer complex) and, as of 2001, how the world's heaviest traffic has moved to two other locations: San Francisco and, believe it or not, the North Pole. Conspiracy theories, anyone?

Dealing With Cookies (info from Macintouch)

• Cookie Monster 1.5.1 deletes cookie files
• Cookie Cutter can selectively remove Netscape cookies
• Anonymous Cookie now runs on the Mac
• Replacing the (Netscape) "MagicCookie" file with a folder prevents creation of new cookies.
• Locking the cookie file has a similar effect, but you can customize the file before locking it.
• Internet Explorer's "ICRP 23292" resource in the Internet Preferences file apparently stores its cookies, but the resource can be set to "locked" and "protected" with a resource editor.
• Update: IE 6 has built-in cookie filtering features.

For Further Reading:

• See TheTechnoZone's Web section index
• Browser Watch: 2001 statistics on browser usage
• News.com: Online ads take a cue from TV. Online publishers and advertisers are closely watching a new experiment in Web marketing that aims to replace discredited "impressions" and "clicks" with a more reliable measurement: time.