So you have just finished setting up your brand new website. You have a nice design and interesting copy, and maybe you even implemented a little search engine optimization to ensure that your project does not go unnoticed. Everything is prepared for your new visitors. But how can you find out if there is any traffic to your website?
It is a question asked by countless first time website owners. After all, websites exist to draw visitors. If you do not know who is visiting your page or what visitors are doing, you cannot tell if you are going in the right direction. Thankfully, statistics utilities such as Webalizer and AWStats can help you shed some light on your website’s performance.
Webalizer and AWStats are tools that process the logs kept by your web server and translate them into figures and graphs that you can use to learn more about your visitors. Let’s examine the statistics generated by the two analytics utilities and see how you can interpret them to understand the behavior of your visitors.