I have had a few sites up for a couple of months but I have not really been checking on them. I figured that it would take at least a month for the spiders to crawl them and a bit longer before people were able to find them.
Yesterday, checking website stats was brought up during the free weekly webinar held by Self-Starters Weekly Tips. I learned that I should be using the awstats tool located inside my cpanel login at my Hostgator account. I logged in after the webinar ended and discovered an interesting fact.
One of my sites was not set up for stats and I didn’t know why. This was particularly bothersome because the publisher for this product is running a MAJOR promotion right now and I’d really like to see what’s going on with my site.
So I got on the hostgator support chat line and was almost instantly connected to Jess, the Customer Service Rep. We went through how things were set up and what my goal was. I explained to her that I did something I don’t normally do-I put a product that I had purchased a domain for into a recommends directory and didn’t set it up as an add-on domain or a subdomain. Usually, I put products that I am promoting but which either link back directly to the publisher’s site or whose links I publish in promotional messages.
After about 10 minutes, we had worked out a plan to set up this other product for stats by doing an add-on domain in my cpanel application, moving the files into the folder created on my root domain and change the redirection with the domain registrar so it shows the new location. This will give me a product on my root domain which tells me that I’ve bought a domain name for it and it sets up an add-on domain so I can track stats for it.
Keep in mind, Jess claimed to not know much about internet marketing and we still figured it out that quickly. That is one of the reasons I always recommend Hostgator to anybody looking for a quality web hosting solution for their sites.
I am curious to know how you keep track of all of your online products with your hosting accounts? What kind of system do you use so you can look at your account with an FTP program and know what’s going on?
[tags]awstats, internet marketing, web hosting solution[/tags]
I use statcounter for my site stats. It gives data in real time and is very reliable. Don’t use your host’s stat facility. Statcounter is much better.
What features does Statcounter have that awstats doesn’t have? What is your favorite feature?
AWSTATS is at the server level and uses the server logs. It is complete in that it records every access to the server, no matter what kind it is and no matter to which file.
The server logs all access to it and it is impossible to escape it. But it will not record any access to copies of the pages in a cache.
On the other hand, Statcounter works at the page level, recording hits to the pages that have the script on them, whether from the server or from cache or local copies. On the other hand if the visitors disable images (third party images at least) they are not detected.
Because Statcounter is focused on hits to pages, it is more useful than AWSTATS which concerns the entire server.
In addition you get breakdowns in ways that AWSTATS cannot give.
Geo-location by Statcounter is much more complete than anything available in AWSTATS. The most powerful feature for me is the ‘Came from’ part where I can know in real time exactly from where my visitors are coming (especially from Search engines etc)
You don’t need to replace AWSTATS by Statcounter. They actually complement each other. I advise you to try it for some days. Only then you’ll know how useful it is.