For starters, skip the “hit counter” tools. Counters are misleading and ultimately worth nothing in terms of ascertaining your site’s success.
A lot of web hosts offer “Webalizer”. You may also have the option to install additional server-side statistics software (example AWStats). Depending on the options offered by your hosting service, you can choose which tracking tool you want to use, or even enable more than one of them simultaneously. Though this may be overkill (The amount of information you get from Webalizer is enormous) and two statistics engines may consume too many server resources.
Comprehending Webalizer (This list is not complete)
Viewing Statistics
A bar-chart of your yearly traffic history will be displayed when you log into Webalizer. Click the name of the month on the table graph to view the details. When you select the month, you will see a thorough analysis of your website traffic. In fact, probably more information than you will ever use.
Referrers: A “referral” occurs when a person clicks on your link from another site. Webalizer will inform you of the site they originated from. It can tell you whether or not the viewer found you through Google; it won’t, however, tell you what they were searching for when they located you. When you register for Google Analytics, you can find out what viewers searched for when they clicked on your page. For each web page you wish to track with Analyitics, place a code snippet (script) in the footer that you will be provided with. You may need to have your website developer do this for you.
Files and Hits: These statistics are the most misleading. Every time a URL is put in, it is considered a “hit”. This is still true if the URL has stopped working or if it was misspelled. A “file” is every completed download whether it be pages, images, sounds, or videos.
Page: Pages are “hits” for existing pages, not including pictures or flash objects that aren’t actually embedded within a page. “Page” filenames usually end in “html”, “php” or “asp”, for instance.
Visitor: Normally the IP address is used to identify a visitor. This could be misleading since if one or more visitors use the identical ISP, or are hidden behind a firewall, they might not be correctly identified. In addition, if a visitor takes too long to move from one page to the next, they may end up being counted as two separate visitors. This usually occurs at 30 minutes but may be changed by the host.
In addition, Webalizer will also log the Web crawlers (Bots such as Google’s “Spider”) which go to your site. This can be found in the “sites” segment of the analysis. It will be a surprise to you how many visitors to your site are spiders — that also may consume a great deal of bandwidth. You may prohibit undesirable bots from crawling your website by making or changing the “robots.txt” file in your home folder. The majority of spiders will honor your wishes, but they aren’t required to do so.