Website Traffic Software

[GoodLife22]

Good morning everyone. I am new here and I need some advice. I am setting up a new website on a local server running IIS 5.

I am looking for some really good website tracking software (total visitors, unique visitors, where are people coming from, ect)

There are a lot of options online, but I would like to know what you guys use instead. I do not want to waste a bunch of time on stuff that doesn't work.

I do not mind spending money on some commercial type of application because we will use the reports for monthly meetings to utilize our website more efficiently.

So what is some good software for tracking website statistics?

Thank you all.

[alvo]

You don't need outside services, nor do you need to spend any money. You will get the most complete statistics for your website from the server logs. All web servers log every incoming request and record a lot of information with each one, such as where they came from, browser type and version, file(s) requested, search engine terms used to get to the site and so on. All you need is to install a script that will take the raw data in the log file and put it into a usable form. AWStats (http://awstats.sourceforge.net/) is a free program that does just that, producing both lists of refined data as well as graphs of major usage areas.