If you're anything like me, you love to know how far your internet ministry is reaching. I podcast my sermons each week, and barely a day goes by when I don't check to see how many subscribers I have and where the most recent hits were from. I've had downloads from Germany, Indonesia, South Africa, France, the UK, and most recently, the Islamic Nation of Iran. In a nine-month period of time, I've had over 12,000 downloads of sermon audio files.
If you're a stats junky--and you haven't already found the statistics that are included free with every hosting account, let me tell you how to enable and view them.
You'll need to login to the hosting manager (Go to "My Account," login, and then click "Hosting Account List," and open the control panel for the website you want to manage). Near the bottom of your control panel is a button labeled "Configure Web Statistics." Using this tool, you can assign configure the stats reporting software, found at
www.yourdomain.com/stats/. Once you configure your statistics, wait 24-48 hours, and you'll be able to see reports on your website. You can find out how many times a specific file has been requested, the commonly used search terms that people used to find your website, and information on where your visitors are coming from.
You might have more complex needs for statistical reporting. Perhaps you want to know what countries your visitors are coming from, or the paths that they are taking through your website. You might want to know how many page views are in an average session, or how often people are getting errors. If these are the sorts of reporting needs you have, you should consider our Traffic Facts™ package as an addon for your website.
Traffic Facts™ produces visual graphs that you can print or convert to Excel. You can export the logfiles so you can analyze them directly. You can even generate automated emails with the reports that you want to see, as often as you want to see them.
Traffic Facts™ is such a powerful program that it would be impossible to outline everything that it does in one blog entry. If you need more power than our standard Site Statistics, I'd encourage you to give Traffic Facts™ a try. You can give it a three month trial for just under $10.
May your website reach all around the world with the love of Jesus!
Grace and Peace,
Jonathan Twitchell
PS. You can check out my sermon podcast on
iTunes, or read more about sermon podcasting at
www.yourchurchpodcast.net.
Labels: products, stats, Traffic Facts
