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Best website statistics package?
goodminton asks: "As the webmaster for a small but growing e-commerce site, I'm becoming increasingly interested in the quality of our site metrics. We currently use a Javascript-based counter that provides good but basic information, however, a recent Slashdot posting has me thinking the stats from our system may not be as accurate as we'd like. What do you think is the best website statistics package, and why?"
You might want to try this: http://www.google.com/analytics/.
It's free!!
(you can register for the invite until it becomes publicly available)
For those subscribers using Slashdot's new discussion system, this link will work better.
From the posting, though, I don't understand why you think your (Javascript-based) stats would be inaccurate, though, since only about 1.34% of users disabled or did not support Javascript.
That said -- I personally use Analog, and although it does give some fairly useful statistics such as search engine terms, most popular directories, referers, etc., I don't find it gives me a very high level of insight into surfing habits. A log analysis tool such as that may be a good starting point for you, though, if you don't currently do analysis of that sort.
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Webalizer. Just feed it some nice Apache logs, and let it do the talking. Or, if you're less of the command-line guy, I've heard Google Analytics is great.
I just went through this process for my employer. While I like Google Analytics (and currently use it for my personal web pages), it's a bit more focused on e-commerce than I need - although that may be good for you.
What I decided on was http://awstats.sourceforge.net/. It's got a pretty impressive feature list, and I like the look, and the sheer volume of data it can collect.
One caveat - the current version (6.5) has a command-injection vulnerability when run in cgi mode (as opposed to statically-created pages), so watch where & how you install it.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
If you are trying to find out how many people are visiting your site, or how popular particular browsers are, just give up now. No stats package can tell you that. Some pretend to, but it's snake oil.
The basic problem is that not only are you fighting against the basic nature of a stateless protocol, but the things that skew your numbers (proxies, caching, etc) skew your numbers by an unknowable amount. Some things inflate your numbers, some things hide visitors from you. They don't cancel each other out like some people tell you (just think about it). In some cases, your visitors might not even communicate with your server at all.
Web statistics are good for measuring server load and monitoring things like search terms people use to find your site, inbound links from referrers, etc. What you will find is that you can install any old stats package, and it will give you lots of pretty charts and numbers, but at the end of the day, you might as well make the numbers up, because they don't reflect reality. And yet for some reason, people still like having them, even when they know the numbers are totally wrong. I have yet to figure out why.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Sawmill is an awesome slicer-and-dicer of your web logs. I haven't done web stuff in several years, but the package was awesome five years ago, and it looks like they've been refining the product over the years.
What I decided on was http://awstats.sourceforge.net/. It's got a pretty impressive feature list, and I like the look, and the sheer volume of data it can collect.
As someone who setup awstats for a high-traffic site last year, let me warn you -- beyond the available options, it ain't customizable. At all. The html generation is embedded in bits and pieces throughout their perl code. Some of the nastiest, speghettiest mess I've ever seen. They don't even use stylesheets for proper styling. If it does exactly what you want, then fine. But be forewarned: if your needs ever change, don't expect awstats to change with them.
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I'm a big fan of AWStats (awstats.sourceforge.net).
We got sucked in by the pretty graphs too. Internally, awstats is a mess. Some of the worst code spaghetti I've seen in awhile. As I already said, I'm not optimistic of their ability to improve going forward.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
If you can get invited to analytics it really rocks. Awstats is good, and I have always been fond of webalizer. I run a small hosting company, and I have found that awstats and webalizer can be a bit processor intensive under certain conditions. The nice thing about analytics is that the processing takes place off site. Analytics also has a lot more information geared toward marketing, and the metrics that can help make marketing decisions. Awstats and webalizer and especially webalizer are more about presenting data from the logs.
-MS2k
Throwing your hands up in the air and declaring that because you cannot be sure it's all garbage is foolishness. Know the limitations of your tools, accept the error, and take what you can get.
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If you're using PHP, you need to give BBClone a try. Just do an include from your scripts and it's good to go. The stats it generates are quite nice. I also use Webalizer on the server logs.
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Mod parent up. I can't imagine why that would have been modded -1, redundant. Awstats has had a string of security problems, which caused me to give up on it.
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We use Urchin - now "Google Analytics". Unless you want to delete cookies every page hit, and use the Web Developer Firefox plugin to remove hidden fields for every form submission, we pretty much have you tracked. This isn't 1995 y'know...
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
So awstats is not configurable. That's not necessasarily a bad point - nearly everyone wants awstats on their sites, and they're happy with the look of it out of the box. But people should be aware that they cannot change it. 99% of the time, this is an absolute non-issue, it gets installed, works, looks pretty. Job sorted.
For the 1% of people who would like to change it, well, they should be aware that it isn't going to be for them, before they start working with it. Again, this is not that big an issue.
For all the users of awstats, the biggest problem is parse time. Awstats can be a lot slower than other stats packages, which isn't a problem until you start hosting 1000 sites on a server when it suddenly will be an issue. But, again, if you host 1000 sites, awstats just isn't for you and you shoudl check out something else.
Sorry, no. Let's say that AOL tune their caching parameters and all of a sudden a hundred thousand of your visitors get a page from AOL's cache instead of from your server. The "trend" will show a massive decrease in visitors, even if the number of visitors you have remains static.
Looking at the difference between two incorrect numbers will not result in a correct number.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Right: simply put awstats behind an
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Webalizer is very useful: we recently set up a new web site, and the information it provides has been handy for tweaking. It doesn't seem to provide everything we could want - there's no obvious way to gauge the relative popularity of different links on a given page, for example - but it does provide an idea of relative browser popularity among our visitors, which pages are most important (or at least most visited), and other useful information.
Of course, like all log file-based tools, it suffers from the modern day curse of webmasters everywhere: caching. For example, the site I mentioned is for a university club. Around 1/3 of our hits are from the university cache servers, which all students are strongly encouraged to use. That messes up any analysis of total hits on each page of the site, and it would also mess up analysis of which links people tend to find most useful (assuming those they follow from one page to another are representative of this) if we had tools to do that.
I'm sure anyone who reads Slashdot regularly will see the upside of caching, but a lot of people forget that it has a downside as well. As a webmaster trying to set up the most useful site possible (this is a non-profit group, run by volunteers, so my interests here are entirely benevolent) I would be more than happy to have accurate stats for all visits to our site in the past month, say, rather than lower bandwidth use.
AFAICS, the only way to get anything close to accurate stats at the moment is to install some sort of "web bug" that will make it through the caches. However, this has rather sinister overtones, and I'm reluctant to do something that might be perceived as "spying". Would the crowd here consider it reasonable to go down that road, given that as stated above we have no ulterior motive and are just trying to monitor the way our new site design is working with a view to improving links etc? Would it reassure you if we did the "privacy policy" thing? (Personally, I don't find them particularly reassuring in most cases. If I don't trust a site not to screw me, why would I trust it more because they say they won't? Then again, full disclosure and all that...) Do we really have to resort to the tried-and-tested "visit counter" graphics? :o)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
As with most things, it's not really that one package is "better" than another so much as that one might be more useful to you at any given time.
I use my own package when a Web site is smaller (say, below a million hits per month) because I would rather sample some actual sessions and see where people went and what they were searching for than get an overview. If you see people are searching for Argyle Socks and are finding your page about the Duke of Argyll, you might want to add an extra page and link to it, "if you were looking for...".
The statistic you most want is the things people looked for that might have reached your Web site and didn't, and that's the one you can't easily find!
For a site getting under 1,000 hits per day, look at the server logs in detail at least once a week, and make navigation easier, add more content where it looks promising, think about why some areas don't get traffic, etc etc.
When you're getting 10,000 hits/day, unless most of them are for graphics, the data can become overwhelming. And if you're over 100,000 hits per day you probably need to go to the sorts of reports that give you a very broad overview.
A link checker and a 404 report can be useful -- Cool URIs don't change!
Oh -- for anyone interested, although I do have hololog set up on for example my words and pictures from old books Web site (in a private directory, sorry), the sourceforge page doesn't have a download, mea culpa. If it looks useful to anyone I've shared copies of "hololog" in the past. It could do with some cleaning up, alas!
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I've done web analytics implementations for smaller (i.e. $10M e-commerce sites) and larger (i.e. hundreds of millions PV/month) companies.
I'm not much of a fun of log file based analytics systems. They are simply too much work to maintain from an infrastructure POV and caching wreaks havoc with the accuracy of the stats. I therefore recommend 1x1 transparent pixel based systems. If you insist on log file based systems, NetTracker and WebTrends make some decent products.
Google analytics is a great package for smaller companies. It is free and offers a nice chunk of functionality. Caveat emptor -- you get what you pay for. When I audited my last employers GA e-commerce metrics against actual online sales, there was a substantial (I think ~10% error)! However it is still a good tool for understanding trends and issues w/ your analytics.
Webside Story (HBX) and Omniture rule the high end market. It has been a while since I checked pricing, but I think you can expect to start out at the ~$10-$20K/yr range. Both of these products are excellent.
Webside Story sells a lower end package (Hitbox Professional) that has limited commerce metrics but is also pretty decent and afforable. They have an enterprise system: HBX that is excellent.
Omniture also has am impressive system. I don't think they have much in terms of entry level offerings.
Web trends has a product Web Trends live that is about 1/2 the price of the enterprise products from Webside Story and Omniture. It has been a good 5 years since I've their product, but I wasn't especially impressed with it at the time.
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