There are a number of web counters and analytical tools on the market, however, its remarkable the number of people that have no idea what the traffic to their site looks like. Free web counters range from Nedstat and Extreme Tracking through to server based tools such as webaliser. Google also provides a comprehensive tool that allows for fairly advanced website traffic monitoring. However, all of these systems are designed to be comprehensive to suit everyone's needs and as such provide far too much information than is immediately required by the average web site owner. As such, TWS has devised a concise counter and analytics system to meet the more immediate requirements of its specific market. This system represents a significant feature of the TWS service. The sections below provide a rough overview of each particular element.

The counter system represents a basic overview of traffic, a snapshot of which can be seen at the top of the page. The counter shows daily and monthly traffic as two separate bar charts giving a clear and immediate idea of traffic volumes. Below this is a reverse chronological list of the 100 hits showing date, time, reverse IP and referrer. The data can also detect occasional networks and extract around 50% of search terms. This means that if a large company, or a company with a network has visited your site, such as an oil company, airline or local authority you can tell who it is, ideal if your market is business to business. The keyword extraction makes it easier to see what people were typing in to find your website.

The Search Terms feature synthesises all the keywords from referrer strings to and shows them in alphabetical order showing the times the term has been searched for and with quick links to Google, Yahoo and Bing to do a search with that term. An interesting feature.

The overview is a hand moderated section that details base key words, update times, domains, directory listings, page rank links, Back link tools, search engine indexing and much more.

Aggregating the companies from the main counter this page shows only hits that might have originated from a company giving you the referrer link and the website of that company as well as the date and time.

The Google page is part of the SEO tool kit and details target keywords and their respective rankings in Google. This can be expanded to include Yahoo, Bing and other search engines.

The site SEO page is actually a structure list of page names, titles, meta descriptions and keywords which provides a comprehensive view of these details in one page, ideal for reviewing page details.

New for 2010 are the tracking features that allow you to track visitor activity over time. Combined with company tracking this allows you to really get a good feel for whats happening. You can see when a visitor found you though a google search, and then returned a week later looking for you by name. You can detect long term trends and modify your site accordingly.

The system is set up to be flexible and can be modified to include almost any other feature required. The counter environment often hosts content management elements such as news, vacancies, document upload, comments and price lists.