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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?"
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.
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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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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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