Understanding who is coming to your web site, where they come from, and what they do when they are there are all important parts of measuring your success in online commerce. As with any investment you make in your business, you need a way of measuring its benefit to the company. Additionally, when you run campaigns you also need a way of accurately measuring the affects of such marketing. In the world of connected commerce, you need to rely on web site statistic and analytic tools.

These tools will give you information about many aspects of the traffic flowing through your web site. Generally you will see a lot of detailed information such as:

• What state or country the visitor originates from
• How many times that visitor has returned to your site
• How long were they on your site and what pages did they look at during that time
• When they entered your site, how did they find you
• If they used a search engine to find you, what keyword or phrase did they use
• When they left your site, where did they go next
• What kind of computer and web browser are they using

All of these details may be interesting in themselves, but the real power is putting them together and performing analysis on them. This allows you to see a history of your efforts and even forecast future trends with accuracy. Instead of blindly offering a web site to the public, these analytical tools allow you to refine your site and respond on a daily basis to increase traffic and even purchases.

One such tool is AWStats, which is a free open source web statistics program. AWStats is different from a lot of other statistics programs such as Google Analytics in that it is a program that resides on your server and analyzes your web server’s logs. Others, such as Google Analytics, don’t read the web server’s traffic logs but instead get information via JavaScript snippets that are injected into the page. The difference between the two may sound unimportant, but depending on the types of visitors coming to your site it can make a big difference in the numbers. This happens because not every web browser supports or allows JavaScript. Thus if such a person comes to your site, he remains essentially invisible in that a program like Google Analytics cannot gather any information on that visitor. A statistics program like AWStats does not have this limitation as it directly reads from the server’s logs and thus catches every bit of activity, no matter who it is.

So how do you choose between the two approaches? Most people today use a computer and internet browser that support JavaScript, making solutions like Google Analytics much more popular than they were 5 years ago. If you expect to have a number of people visiting your site using a mobile device such as a cell phone, then the JavaScript issue begins to be a problem then as many of those devices may not have support.

Another factor to consider is that while Google Analytics is free and easy to setup, AWStats does require setup on your web server. This could translate into a charge from your network administrator who would need to set this up on your server. Generally speaking, most SellingPoint users will be better off using Google Analytics. But in the end, it’s nice to know you have the choice.

More information on AWStats is available here:

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

To integrate AWStats into a SellingPoint site, follow these steps:

1. From SellingPoint Management Studio, click the Exchange Accounts button on the Home tab of the ribbon
2. Locate and double click on the site in the tree view that you want to link to AWStats
3. Click the More Settings button
4. Select the Statistics tab
5. Under the Analytics section, change the analysis program to AWStats
6. Paste the URL you received from your network administrator when AWStats was setup on the server
7. Click OK to save the changes and then click OK twice more to go back to the main program screen
8. You may now click on the Marketing navigation tab and then select the account you just modified in order to see the AWStats results directly within SellingPoint

For an overview of some of the more popular tools for tracking activity in SellingPoint, take a look at this video demonstration.