As we looked at the Webalizer statistics, you can imagine that there are other similar packages you can use.

I have mentioned before, HostGator will give you AWStats, but as it is a free software package you can install it on your own hosting account if you want to. It is pretty straightforward to install and, if you have the space on you account, you might want to try it as well. This is an option you might want to consider if you don't like to track your web site data using free services such as StatCounter or Google Analytics.

The following is a small screenshot from the demo site of AWStats:

One big advantage of AWStats is that you can see the full list of search terms and keyword phrases that are used in order to get to your web site.

The major disadvantage for me is the fact that it is better to give it a separate MySQL database as you don't want to overload your Joomla! database with all this data. This means that you need to be able to get an extra database on your hosting account and use it for AWStats.

You may also find that the server, your web site is hosted on, does not have the capacity that you want and need in terms of CPU resources. In that case the speed of your web site, along with the rest of the sites hosted on that server, will suffer. So, if you want to do this, make sure you set all performance options correctly.

Again, you can use this software for free, but use it only if you are really concerned about your traffic data on other free resources. Most of these free resources are secure enough to protect the data you collect to analyze your traffic.

You may have a question: Why did you mention it here? Well, my answer is: To give you an alternative for the services you will be looking at next.

If you do a quick search on Google with the term "Website statistics", you will notice that the following three web sites in the top 10 on the list are the only ones that actually provide some kind of statistics service for web sites:

The other results are large web sites that provide all kinds of statistics about Federal taxes and really old information dating back to 1998.

The Alexa web site information

When you open the link to alexa.com, you will see the section Movers & Shakers on the front page, along with the list of the web sites shown in the graph.

That graph is a nice tool that you can use to compare you web site to those of your competitors' sites. But if you want more data about your site (and that of your competitors' sites) click on the menu link on top that says Site Info. Now you get two option fields—Keyword Search (to enter the keyword you want to search) and Site Lookup (where you can put in a URL).

The first option is nice to work with if you need to find web sites related to your web site's topic. We will be coming back to this option once you start working on your incoming links. The second option is what we are looking for now—the data that alexa.com has about your web site. So, go ahead and put your URL in the right field and hit Go.

Ah, well… you might not be ranking in the first 100,000 ranking sites of Alexa and that is why you won't see a graphic for your traffic stats displayed. However, next to the graph your ranking is displayed, along with the progress (or regression) you made in the previous month and the previous quarter.

However, what you might be more interested in are the three tabs on the right—Bounce%, Time on Site, and Search % (the options shown in the preceding screenshot).

• Bounce%: This gives you an indication of the stickiness factor of your site
• Time on site: This gives you an indication if your content is read
• Search%: This offers you the percentage of traffic going to your web site through search engines

We will cover these topics in a detailed manner in the Google Analytics section where there is even more data to show, and more explanations on what you can do with this kind of data.

Two more tabs, namely Related Links and Keywords are also good to check to see if you are on track with your keyword list. More important is the fact that you can also get data about your competitors.

So the question that needs to be asked is: Is Alexa.com a good tool to get your web site's statistics, and is it an depth analysis tool? Well, it is not—it will give you only some insight into the traffic numbers of your competitors' sites. But it is a great tool, just like Webalizer if you want to get a global idea about the status of your web site when you look at traffic and search terms. You can do that in less than five minutes and for free as well.

But you want more. You want real data that you can use to improve your rankings. You want data that gives you the information you need to find the weak spots and the strong performers within your site! So, what you need is a detailed tracker that doesn't strain your hosting server, and wouldn't it be nice if it was available free of charge?

We have already seen in Chapter 1 how to put up these counters and how to implement them on your Joomla! web site. The best way to integrate them into your site is by using modules. This is because if you change your template the counters will still work, provided your template uses the module positions, else you just have to move the module to a position that is used. As we saw in Chapter 1, you can place it as the last module in the left or right menu position.

The main reason for giving you the information in Chapter 1 is to make sure that you started monitoring your traffic as soon as possible. If you have not yet implemented a counter such as StatCounter or Google Analytics, drop everything and get it into place! It will take you about five minutes only and the rewards are of a much greater value than you can imagine right now.

A few years back you could get detailed information on the last 100 pageviews, which has now increased to 500 page views—thanks to the great service offered by statcounter.com, which has been running for many years.

If you want a large number of pageview details to analyze, you can upgrade and pay for a 1500 to 100,000 detailed page quota with a price that is stated on a per month/per year basis. If you upgrade to 1500 pageviews, you get a total of 2000 because the 500 free pageviews are added to it. This is the one I implement on every site, along with Google Analytics, and is the one I look at every day!

Now, why is that? This is because I get an overview of all my web sites (project) on one page and with numbers that I can compare easily. I also have a separate account to monitor all my customers' web sites and I can even give each of them separate access to the statistics of their web sites only. Also, the statistics are easy to read, and the customers can look at their site's statistics without my help.

When you log in to StatCounter, you get a project page overview with the headers as shown in the following screenshot:

You also get the project details line, which has some icons displayed on it.

We will go into the details of some options and functions you get from StatCounter and learn how to use them.

One option you need to set within StatCounter is a blocking cookie and, if you have a static IP address from which you browse the Internet, it's good to block that too. If you don't know that static IP address (mostly used by broadband connections), visit your web site that has a StatCounter script running and click on a few pages, then look at the recent visitors activity and you will see your own visit and IP address shown so that you just have to copy it. To block that address you click on the wrench icon again and select Settings.

In the lower part of the screen you will see a form where you can paste your own IP address. If you have multiple projects set up already, you can update this field across all projects at once. If you do this on the account where you have your customer's IP address blocked, the later options will overwrite all those values, so be careful in such a case.

Now go back to the wrench overview screen, go to the function Create Blocking Cookie, and click on the button that says Stop logging my visits. From this moment onwards, only the real visits from other computers are included in the statistics and your own visits are no longer counted.

If you want to change the display of your counter or if you need to retrieve the installation code again, you can get it from here as well. If you want to show off your visitor numbers and want the colors of that counter to match your site's layout, that can also be accomplished here.

Personally I don't like those counters anymore, they have these 90s look and feel and they don't provide any extra information to your visitors. In some cases I show a StatCounter button if it makes sense to show it, for example on site building web sites, otherwise I use the invisible option.

If you are worried about what search engines might think of such an outgoing link, keep in mind the statcounter.com is one of the very few web sites that have a PR of 8 and at one time even had a 10 (Google also has a PR of 8).

Once you have logged in to StatCounter, you can select the project that you want to analyze. The first thing that will be shown is a graphic display of your web site's traffic. If you start with a project, it is shown as bar graph.

This is really horrible to read and it is advisable to immediately switch to the area graph, which is much easier to read. If you want this to be your standard view, select the little option Save As Default and push the Submit button.

You can see several options to check your statistics over different time periods. Above the graph you have view options such as Daily (default), Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly. If you use those options, you will also get an area graph with the data compressed for that time frame. On the yearly graph, you can see when you started with StatCounter, it shows data going back several years. This is useful for sites that have been established for a long time. Beside the graph you have a long list of menu options.

You can go through all of these, but the things you should use are:

Some items in the following screenshot have been altered for privacy reasons, but it should be is clear that you can get a lot of useful information. You can see the navigation path through your web site in a table following the text Navigation Path.

If it is a returning visitor, you can also see on which dates he/she visited your site.

If you have an international site, you might be interested in the Recent Visitors Map.

All these options and graphics tell you a lot about your web site. As I mentioned before, you not only see how your traffic is growing over time, but, for example, you can also analyze traffic spikes to see if somebody placed a link on Stumblr or even Digg. But it could also be because of a blog post you made, or perhaps somebody with a large number of followers posted a link to your web site. It doesn't matter who or what created that spike—it is important that you analyze and act upon it!

If somebody mentioned your site in a blog post, on a forum, or anywhere else on the Internet, you should at least check it out. In some cases it might be a great way to learn about somebody who writes about the same topic as you do, or you could help someone gain more insight into your writing.

If you are looking at building links to your web site, now is the right time to start as the person recommending you already knows what your site is about. You can add the results from the Keyword Analysis to your keyword list and see if they match with your initial research.

Analyzing your site's recent activity can give you a better understanding of the way your visitors navigate through your web site. It involves answering questions such as:

We will see more information on the navigation issue in Google Analytics.

StatCounter is a great tool for getting insight into the main statistics of your web site really fast, and it presents it through nice visual graphics and elements. It is very user friendly and is easy to understand.

The biggest problem is the limited number of pageviews that you can analyze for free. You can upgrade to a paid account if you want to, but for such in depth analysis, I suggest we turn to Google Analytics instead.

As I mentioned before we will be looking at Google Analytics for several options that are not present in the other statistical service options or are very limited. We have already covered some parts of Google Analytics such as setting up the initial mail account and implementation of the code in a module. But now we need to set some extra options before start looking at a large amount of data.

First things first, when you log in and select the web site of your choice, you get a great dashboard that shows you the main statistics for that site.

You can alter that dashboard later, if you want some different views. But one of the things that we really need to do right now is to filter our own visits. If you have a static IP address, you can set up a filter.

Filtering out your static IP address visits

Go to your Dashboard and click on Analytics Settings in the upper left corner of page. You will find a link to the Filter manager in the right corner at the bottom of your screen just after the site profiles.

Now you can add the following filter:

If you don't know your IP address you can look it up at www.whatsmyip.com. Please note that the input should be formed as 63.212., and so on, so don't forget to put the "" in the right place.

Excluding your visits from a IP dynamic address

If you don't have a static IP address you need to create a page for your web site that contains a special string for a cookie to be set. The page should contain the following code:

<body onLoad="javascript:__utmSetVar('no_report')">

Create that page outside Joomla! as a standard HTML file that only you know about. The HTML page you create only needs to contain this string, so you don't need to create a new content page. After you placed the file online using FTP, you can browse to it using the URL you have chosen, and upon opening the page with your browser the cookie is set.

If you want to filter out other computers please go to that page using that computer. Now you are ready to create a new filter with the following settings:

That should do the trick and clean your future visits. Looking at your Dashboard menu you have several options, the best to start with:

• Visitors—the overview
• Traffic Sources
  • Referring sites
  • Keywords
• Content
  • Top landing pages
  • Site overlay

Getting the big picture of traffic

Let's look into the specific areas of your Google Analytics and see what you can do with all that data.

Visitors overview

In the default screen of the visitor overview you get a graphical expression of your web site's state of growth over the last month. In this specific graph you can see the wave movement of weekend drops in traffic. You also get the numbers that give you an expression of how well your site is built to get people to read more than just one page.

In this case there is work to be done as 1.5 Average Pageviews for the site in question is not good enough. If it was a blog, then it would not be a problem as blog post readers tend to read one article and then move on.

To compare the figures above, here is another screenshot of a different web site for the visitors overview:

As you can see, the numbers are very different. This site has many returning visitors and a very low bounce rate.

What to look for by numbers

Let's look at what information we should look for in the numbers shown in the preceding screenshot:

• The visitors:

  The numbers you saw in the two preceding screenshots tell you how often the site is visited. You can see how many visitors you get (in both cases for a month), along with the number of unique visitors. A unique visitor is tracked by a cookie that Google places on the computer of your visitor. These cookies have a long lifespan, some up to five years. This means if a visitor revisits your site in a month or two, he/she is seen as a returning visitor. If your visitor clears their cookies or has cookies disabled, his/her next visit is counted as a unique visit. The last option is an indication of whether your site attracts people who are coming back to your site to read more over and over again, or if they are just one day flies who move on and never return. If your site is an e-commerce site, then you really want more returning visitors because they are more willing to buy after a few visits to your shop.

• The pageviews:

  While the number of pageviews is a traffic indicator, the number of pageviews per visit is a quality indicator. A page in this respect is not a reload of the article your visitor is reading, but it is the page displayed if the visitor moves to read a new article on your site. The more pageviews per visit, the better the site is at retaining visitors and encouraging them click through to other pages on the same site.

• Time on site:

  The time that a visitor spends on your site is also a good quality indicator, but it can also have a different meaning. If your site is very fast loading (which it should) and mostly picture based, you can go through relevant pages very fast. If you have a long loading time, few pages, and short content per page, you need to check your loading time. It is very likely you will see fewer returning visitors as well.

• Bounce rate:

  A high bounce rate means that people will come to your site, read a page, and will move on to the next site. This can also be seen as a quality score. In most cases a low bounce rate means people have a higher interest in your web site and find the information good enough to browse around. A high bounce rate can also be an indication of good quality—it depends on what kind of site you have built. A site that wants to capture the visitors and keep them on the site has bounce rates and time spend on the site different as compared to a site made for AdSense or an affiliate site. The last two (AdSense and an affiliate site) want their visitors to click on an advertisement or move to a vendor's site. So, if they do that well, visitors won't stay long! If you have a site that presents people with solutions for their problems, then a high bounce rate could also mean that they have found the information they wanted right away and they are off to implement it.

In all the previous four cases, you need to take the actual purpose of the web site into consideration. An e-commerce web site has to have a different visitors' overview than an affiliate web site. The first one needs returning visitors to do well, the second one needs to get their visitors to act and buy the product from another web site.

If you find very large discrepancies for your site, you know that the layout of your site and the articles need more work to capture your visitors. A very good indicator is the Benchmarking function, which you can find a link to, in the visitor menu. To get those benchmarks you need to share your data (anonymously) with Google.

The question is: Is it worth it? Well, the answer is yes. Just look at the following picture and you will have some good indicators, which will show whether your site is doing above or below average.

Learning more of you traffic sources

The traffic sources screen is clearly divided into several sections to give you a direct view of the different sources that bring traffic to your web site. Having a large percentage of visitors through search engines means you have done your SEO work well. But the higher it is, the larger the drop will be if your ranking in the results starts to fall.

What you are looking for is direct visitors who know your web site address already and more referring sites. We will be looking at ways to get those links to your site in the next chapter.

At the bottom of the screenshot there are two sections—one is called Sources and the other Keywords. There is also a table that shows the top five for each of those fields directly, and following that is a link called Full report, and that is the one you want for the keywords.

For the traffic sources, you need to look at the following two options in the traffic sources menu.

• Referring Sites:

  This is a great source overview to see what sites are linking to your pages and are sending you traffic. You can use this list to find possible partner web sites to start communicating, sharing, and exchanging links with. You can also identify possible scraper sites that use your RSS feed or articles to their benefit. It is up to you if you want to take action on those sites. It is possible that they are sending you more traffic than you might have expected.

• Search Engines:

  This gives you a table with the search engines that send you traffic. In most cases this will be Google, followed by Yahoo!, and then the smaller search engines. If you click on the search engine's name in that table you will get the keywords in that engine that have sent you the most traffic. It is very much possible that your Yahoo! keyword terms are different to those from Google.

Structure and content analysis

The last, but certainly not the least important section is all about content, which is the cornerstone of your web site.

Take your time to go through all the different menu items to look at the pages in your site from different angles. One thing you might notice is the fact that your top landing pages are also your top exit pages. This is also largely dependent on the topic of your site and your site's "stickiness".

Again it is totally different for e-commerce sites and affiliate sites. If the top exit page for your e-commerce site is the page just before the checkout payment page, you need to analyze the process and see how to improve that final page. Just improving that single page may result in a lot more transactions being completed.

Another way to see how your pages are helping you to keep more visitors is by using the Navigation Summary. This will show you which pages your visitor visited next and tells you the exit click and next page click percentages. The entrance paths will show you in a clear manner the pages to which people are moving next.

Site Overlay

The Site Overlay is one of my favorite tools. It opens in a new window and puts an overlay over your web site as a kind of transparent sheet. On that sheet Google shows you the number of clicks that have been done on a specific item. You can click through and navigate your web site right through that overlay and see the click information in numbers and percentages for each item. Now, you can see where people click on your site and which items are not as popular as you might have thought. In one case I noticed that a certain image was clicked on a lot, but there was no action attached to that image. By connecting a link to a relevant page that fits the image I realized a higher click through rate, more pageviews and, even more important, a better experience for my visitors as they clearly expected the image to be clickable.

In the standard view, Google Analytics shows data for just a month. You can select another time span by clicking on the start date and an end date for the Date Range in the agenda and then hitting Apply.

You can also select the Timeline and change it by moving and/or extending the sliders. This might give you a better view if you are looking for a special spike or drop in your site's traffic.

If you select a large time range, you may need to try and use the other views such as week-or month-based graph.

You can even compare two different date ranges to see how your traffic has changed.

Joomla! statistics

If you are done with this chapter, you might be wondering why I have not mentioned the Joomla! statistics components and the statistics that Joomla! gathers. They will only show you the number of hits your articles have had and that can be cleared by clicking on the Reset button.

The reason I haven't included any Joomla! statistics components is due to the fact that they slow your site down over time as the data in your database grows. Most of the components are also focused on visitor numbers and not on how they got to your web site. Having a nice module with a number of visitors to your site may sound appealing, but it offers no insight to the behavior of those visitors.

I have run Joomla! statistics components on several of my sites, but now, they are all replaced by StatCounter combined with Google Analytics. These services give you more information that you can use to further optimize your site than any Joomla! component I have seen.