Analyzing the data about your web site visitors can help you improve your web site in many ways. Marketing will want information on the keywords that potential customers are searching when they find your product / services. Sales will want conversion information (what users convert from simply reading your site to 'the next step').
We provide two different solutions which work in dramatically different ways to gather the raw data, the way each tool presents this data to you differs but it is the same information.
The two methods are:
- LogFiles: The classical method to gather this information is to process the log files from the server. This solution lacks some information. It also has some 'junk' data from hackers and search engines crawling your site - you likely dont care how often google indexes your site, you only care that they do. It also won't count anything cached, either by the user revisiting a page already cached on their local machine or through proxy servers caching. For this our preferred solution is AWStats
- Page Tagging: The newer method for analytics relies on 'page tagging' which uses a small javascript which you will need to add to every web page on your site (usually this is done in an include file, menu or footer, masterpage, etc.). The client runs this javascript which reports various additional information back to server, including additional capabilities of the client which are not usually reported in the server log files. For this our preferred solution is Piwik.
We recommend Page Tagging however we do support either method running within the BitShop cloud.
Page Tagging Based:
Reporting will be in real time by default - On low volume web sites, up to a few hundred visitors per day, we recommend real time reporting. For sites with more traffic we recommend hourly (or daily) updates of the reports to reduce billing of additional resource usage. The choice is yours as to which method is used, the cpu time and disk time may acrue additional costs for sites with traffic - we do not cap the resources available for this analysis, so as long as the software can handle the load we will be happy to accomodate real time reporting.
Cost: Free for BitShop hosted accounts*
Log File Based:
Reporting will be daily - Up to one year of reporting history will be archived automatically by the system.
Cost: Free for BitShop hosted accounts*
NOTE: Both of these solutions, AWStats and Piwik you can run in-house, on your dedicated server, or on our cloud as we offer here. BitShop staff can assist with the installation, configuration, or troubleshooting of these solutions on your Windows Server on an hourly bases, regardless of what provider the server is at, or even in house servers.
Both solutions are actively developed and enhanced, upgrades are done as requested.
* Resource Usage based billing: Free for up to 8 hours/month resource time. Additional cpu time is available as a utility and will simply be billed "as needed" unless a different (custom) agreement is in place.
Assistance beyond installation is available on an hourly basis by our staff.