Advantages And Disavantages Of Server Webstats Script
Did you know that you can go to your web sites’ server statistics pages to check on, among others,
a) The number of visitors that came to your website?
b) The number of search engines that crawled your pages?
c) Keywords that people use search via search engines to land on your web sites’ pages?
d) The countries these visitors came from?
e) The bandwidth that was used during a period of time?
Did you know that these server side statistics programs are usually provided at no cost whatsoever as an extra service to subscribing customers and that most service providers provide more than one type of statistics program?
My service provider, for instance, makes available three types of statistics gathering software programs which I can open and read via my user interface so that I have three different sources I can cross-reference.
They are:
Awstats
Advanced Website Statistics
Webalizer
These statistics pages are of enormous importance to any website owners who wishes to keep track of a number of parameters that can help them develop their online business. Knowing which keyword their visitors typed can be of paramount importance as this can help with finding inspiration for fresh content.
About the disadvantages:
a) The information statistics results pages provide is not easy to read, it would seem that these have been designed by and for engineers, so that it really takes some getting used to.
b) Distilling useful information from statistics web pages can be a boring and time-consuming task.
c) Exporting and filtering or discriminating results is often complicated or even not available.
d) The results these servers collect are not always complete. Sometimes, a web server manager might decide that for certain periods of time, for example, while some or other update task is running, that the statistics software needs to be shut off. During this period the server is not collecting any information and you will not even know about it.
e) There is usually a 24 hour time lag between an event, such as a visit to a specific page, and a retrievable result.
About the 24 hour time lag:
This has a historic origin. In the early days, when random access memory (RAM) was extremely expensive and hard to come by, software engineers had to make do and live with the fact that the space available to provide a computer with instructions was very limited. On the server side of things, it was easy enough to install the statistics gathering software programs, but they were considered resources hogs.
To limit the amount of resources these programs would use on a web server, someone had the bright idea to limit less essential software programs to update only during low traffic periods. It was rapidly known by users that statistics became available usually a day later. This set a precedent and created a habit that still persists today.
The fact is that computing power as enormously progressed and that waiting a whole day for stats to appear as become completely redundant. Nowadays servers are so powerful that they could provide you with real-time data.
You could for instance chose to install an application that provides you with real-time useful feedback from your web server. One such application is named Keyword Catcher. This is a server side PHP script that will show you the queries that visitors typed into their browsers via Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other major search engine. The search engine results page produced a link to your website and the visitor clicked on it to land on one of your websites’ pages.
Keyword Catcher will now be able to reproduce the exact same page that your visitor was presented by the search engine. This allows you to see which page rank your web page had at the time of the query. That in turn gives a website owner enormously useful feedback on how the search engines perceive his web pages, allowing him to take corrective measures or make use of opportunities.
As things stand today only a minority of people is aware of the enormous potential of server side statistics or the inherent lucrative use this information gathering can provide in terms of business intelligence. Only very large corporations have the budgets to develop and maintain the software needed to distil useful business intelligence. Keyword Catcher is a first step in making available strategic information to website and small business owners who feel the need to know more about people visiting their web sites’ pages.
