Best website statistics package? 79
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?"
Re:AWStats (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One word (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Useful tools, but log-files are flawed (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
Keep in mind its flaws. (Score:1, Insightful)
$ grep goog
0.0.0.0 www.google-analytics.com
0.0.0.0 google-analytics.com