Tracking Web Site Use

You may wish to track and analyze data on the use of your Web site. These data can be useful to identify the most popular pages on your site, the search terms people use to reach your site, and the Web browsers and operating systems that they run. You can make informed decisions about the design and organization of your Web site based on these statistics.

UW Computing and Communications (C&C) has information about tracking Web site usage applicable to Web sites on their servers (depts.washington.edu, faculty.washington.edu, and so on). Essentially, Web sites that want to track visits first need to turn on the personal log files that record Web site usage and then later, analyze the resulting data with a statistical reporting tool such as Webalizer or wwwstat.

Other Web site tracking and reporting tools, like Site Meter and WebTrends Live™, are also available.

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