Yes, you can track the downloading of external files as if they were page views. Web-Stat is the only traffic analysis tool with this ability at the time of this writing. Instructions are available here

If you sell banner ads on your site you may be interested in knowing which banner is the most popular and which links to outside resources are most heavily followed.

The difficulty is that Web-Stat can only be installed on your own pages, so it's hard to directly measure the fact that a page outside of your control was opened by one of your visitors. However when that page is accessed through a link on your site, clicks on the link can still be measured so you can find out how often each banner or links were used. Instructions are available here

By default, Web-Stat will identify your pages in the reports using their URL. In order to make the stats easier to read and more manageable, you can use the page title instead of the URL (by selecting that option in the Control Panel) or choose custom names for each page.

To custom-name a page, simply use the advanced version of the Web-Stat code on the page in question, then insert a name between the single quotes after the 'page_name' variable as follows:

var page_name='any_name';

A page name is any character string containing only alphabetical letters, digits or the hyphen and underscore characters. Blanks are not permitted.

More information on page naming is available here

You can easily tell Web-Stat to ignore your own visits to your site. Simply log into the Control Panel for your account, click on 'Tracker settings', select 'Exclude my own visits > yes' and submit.

As soon as you do so, visits to your site made with the browser you were using when you set the exclusion will be ignored by Web-Stat.

Note:

• If you use several computers or browsers to access your site, you need to repeat the above for each computer/browser, so that they are all excluded.

• The exclusion is set by writing a cookie on the computer's hard disk. If your computer's cookies get deleted or reset for any reason, then the exclusion setting will go back to 'Exclude my own visits > no' and will need to be re-adjusted.

More information on this topic is available here

If you use a fixed IP you can tell Web-Stat to ignore visits to your site by this IP. Simply log into the Control Panel for your account, click on 'Tracker settings', enter the IP to be excluded in the 'IP exclusion' box and submit.

If you need to exclude a range of IP you can do so by entering the low-end IP, followed by a hyphen, followed by the high-end IP. For example to exclude IP's between 227.234.0.0 and 227.234.69.230 you would enter the following IP exclusion : 227.234.0.0-227.234.69.230

More information on this topic is available here

There are two types of referrers to your site:

• Sites that send you traffic without charging a fee (search engines for instance). These sites link to you with a normal HTML link (when you hover the mouse over the link you see your own URL in the browser's status bar)
  
  

  Web-Stat will automatically detect all referrals generated by these referrers. In the case of search engines, the keywords used are also recorded and you will be able to simulate the exact search that led a given visitor to your site (click on the referrer in the 'detail of recent visitors' report).

  Note that for the above to work, two conditions must be met:
  
  

  1. You must be using the standard (or advanced) version of the Web-Stat code (the simplified version of the code is not capable of referrer tracking)
     
     
  2. The Web-Stat code must be installed on your site's entrance pages (the first page that people see when following an outside link to your site)
  
  
  
• Sites that send you traffic for a fee (pay-per-click search engines, and most sites on which you purchase a banner or an advertisement). These sites link to you with a redirect (when you hover the mouse over your link you don't see your URL in the browser's status bar, instead you see a URL on the advertiser's own site, which then redirects to your URL if you click on the link)

  For this type of referrer, you'll need to make a slight modification to the URL that a visitor is sent to in order for Web-Stat to correctly detect where the visitor came from :

  Instead of asking the advertiser to send traffic to www.my_site.com you would ask that the traffic be sent to www.my_site.com?source=referrer_name (replace 'referrer_name' by the name under which you want this particular referrer to appear in your stats). Your visitors will end-up on the exact same page, but Web-Stat will be able to extract the referrer name from the URL and correctly keep track of where your traffic is coming from.

  More information on the formatting of URLs for precise tracking of your pay-per-click campaigns is available in the referrer and search engine tracking tutorial

Internet was designed with people's privacy in mind, making it technically impossible to get personal information on your visitors (such as name, email address, profile, etc.) All we can do is detect the IP number and domain name of the server from where the request to your site originated. 99% of the time that request comes from an ISP (i.e. AOL, Compuserve, Earthlink, etc.) and the IP number has been dynamically allocated to the visitor (which means that if the same visitor comes back later he/she will have a different IP number).

The only case when you can identify a visitor is when he/she is connecting through a private network with a fixed IP number, but this is not a frequent occurrence.

Note that visitor identification is plain impossible : no one can offer that service so don't waste your time looking for it. Keep in mind that in the end this is a blessing : imagine your mailbox every morning if every site you visited could collect your personal information...

Yes, all your stats can easily be converted into Excel tables which you can then save and manipulate on your own computer. Simply log in to see your stats then click on the 'export stats' link on the top right of the screen

From the next page click on the category of stats that you wish to export and that's it : an Excel report will automatically appear on your computer.

You can also download individual reports by clicking on the 'download' link in the action bar just above and to the right of each report

By default Web-Stat will identify a page by using its URL, minus the query string if there is one (the query string is a question mark appended to some URLs, followed by a string of character). If your site is built in such a way that your URLs are differentiated only by their query string, then by default Web-Stat will identify all your pages by the same name, which can be confusing.

There are two solutions :

• Identify the pages by their 'title' : this is only a matter of turning that option 'on' in the Control Panel ('stats settings'). As soon as you do so Web-Stat will stop using the URL to identify the pages and will use the page's HTML title instead.

• Name the pages manually : the other solution is simply to 'name' the pages yourself by inserting a custom name in the Web-Stat code : for details on how to do this please click here.

Web-Stat only measures 'real' traffic, generated by actual visitors. Robots and spiders are not counted in your stats.

You can add a single Web-Stat account on as many sites as you wish, but if you do this your stats will be aggregated in one account and you won't be able to get traffic patterns for each site individually.

This can be fine if you have several URLs or sites that are part of a larger ensemble, and you want to have an overall picture of the traffic on the larger 'meta site'.

However, if you want separate stats reports for your sites, then you will need to create separate Web-Stat accounts, one for each site. Note that quantity discounts are available if you own more than four acounts.

Once you have created/registered your first account, you can create additional ones from the Control Panel (click on [ add an account ] in the first section)