“Web Analytics” is the fancy name for statistics programs.

If you’re serious about making the Web work for you, a good analytics program is essential. One great advantage of Internet Marketing is measurability. However that is only as true as you have accurate statistics.

Nearly every hosting plan comes with a free statistics program, usualy AWStats or Webalyzer. These are very rudimentary. They aren’t very accurate and they provide a limited amount of information.

The best of the free programs is Google Analytics. It provides a lot of information, but has serious inadequacies.

Some important things are hard to do with it. A major problem is that it does a lousy job of detecting and not counting robot visits.

A typical website may get hundreds of visits during the course of a month from automated computer programs – called robots. Some of these are legitimate – like Google and other search engines “spidering” your site in order to update their indexes with any changes.

Many of them are hackers or spammers searching your site for vulnerabilities.

If these robot visits aren’t detected and ignored, it’ll seriously distort the statistics and may result in incorrect analysis on your part.

There’s also no easy way in Google Analytics to set the program to ignore visits by yourself and your staff. Again, that can distort statistics.

All paid web analytics programs solve these problems. There is a considerable range of sophistication (and cost) amongst them. Some programs are designed for the big business site getting tens of thousands or millions of visits per month, with a hefty fee for each site tracked.

Others, like Hitslink, the program we use, are moderately priced subscription services with a fee based on number of websites and number of pages viewed per month. There are limitations on its capabilities but it is well-suited to sites getting hundreds to several thousand visits per month.