What monitoring solutions do you use for understanding who is coming to your website and what they are doing while they are there? I think it’s quite important for every site owner to be aware of its visitors.
There is simple solution - User Statistic Software. If you do prefer third party script I would recommend go for Statcounter. Their service does work great in details given, plus a real-time report and it's FREE!! Their paid version is also excellent and I recommend you should use paid version if you can afford. If you do prefer for self-hosted version I would recommend Piwik (They are used to be "PHPMyVisites" before but they do changed later). This one is a greatest statistic software I ever used for self-hosted version.
*shrugs shoulders* All I really need to know is where they came from, how long they stay, and if they go to another page. See if your host has data like that as part of their service. Or try Goggle Analytics.
Google Analytics is the best tool so far to track the traffic. Sitetrafficstats[dot]com is another way you can try!!!
I will suggest that use various software that are available and evaluate yourself which are worth enough for you. There are various software like Google Analytics, stat counter and piwik etc. which are popular in the market. You can analyze the traffic through that.
Google analytics, AWStats and Woopra. Google analytics - Use this to do over all tracking AWStats - Backup, and so you know what pages are 404'ing, etc. Woopra - So you can watch users in real time, start a chat with them, and see how they process the site. Very Cool!
I use site analytics because it is sold by the hosting company. Iv'e never tried anything other paid program. However, it works quite well. I would recommend some type of visitor program for any serious site. However, the Google program is free so I would start out with that.