[william]

Okay, so I have a site which I'd like to start offering advertising space for people/business. For them to be interested I would need to show them how many new and regular people are viewing the site each month. It would also be great to identify the most popular pages within the site.

What's the best way to gain figures of your web traffic?

Obviously the figures must be :

• Accurate
  
• Reliable
  
• Trustworthy

I'm sure there lots of web info on this, can anyone point me in the right direction or share some of their experience?

[marcamos]

I recommend nothing but Google Analytics. Free and extensively detailed; all you need is a (free) Google account.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

[Karl Buckland]

Google Analytics uses tracking tags (such as small images placed somewhere in your HTML) in order to track visitors on your pages. Often this means that search engines, or other bots as well as visitors who don't download images or have javascript turned off, as well as users of some ad blocking software will not be counted in your stats. This also means that Google Analytics normally won't work on intranets, etc. You also want your 'tag' for Google to be as early in the page as possible, otherwise if the user clicks on a link before the page is loaded, the hit may not be counted.

Log analysing is far more reliable as it looks at the server logs and therefore everything is counted.

But, the reason that people like Google Analytics so much is that it makes analysing the data it collects very easy and it shows you trends in an easy to understand manner. There is log analysing software to do that but it costs. The free log analysers aren't bad, but won't do the same detailed analysis that you can get Google (or paid software) to do for you.

The best free software log analysers are (in my opinion) AWStats and Webalizer. Both of those websites have demos so you can see the kind of detail you get.

[william]

I've gone with Google Analytics for now and must saw I am very impressed by it all. The analysis mode is fantastic and I think this is really gone help me out.

I feel that clients are likely to see that the figures have come from Google and immediately put some trust into them, which is nice.

Thanks for your help both.

Just while I'm posting, Sirkent, I read somewhere on Digg that both those two log analysers can open up massive security gaps within your site. Hmm shame I can't find the article now, but it was something like "Dave's 10 tips on making better web security"...

[sypher]

You could also have a referral system, if your doing ppc on your site. Which send the information of the click to a database then forwards to the site.

[Karl Buckland]

wgardner, on Nov 15 2006, 03:52 PM, said:

Just while I'm posting, Sirkent, I read somewhere on Digg that both those two log analysers can open up massive security gaps within your site. Hmm shame I can't find the article now, but it was something like "Dave's 10 tips on making better web security"...

I don't see how that's possible. As they analyse the logs they don't need to be publically viewable and if they are then your security is as good as the method you use to password protect them. Of course, if you can find something to the contrary then I'd love to hear it.

Regardless, I'm glad you found that Google Analytics is a good tool - it's probably a lot easier to setup if your hosting company doesn't already have a stats package to offer you.

[william]

Sirkent, on Nov 15 2006, 10:19 PM, said:

I don't see how that's possible. As they analyse the logs they don't need to be publically viewable and if they are then your security is as good as the method you use to password protect them. Of course, if you can find something to the contrary then I'd love to hear it.

Hey found that page, but it sounds like you have good security measures covered anyway.

Maybe an interesting short read though.

[ShakingSpirit]

A quick search through the Shaking Spirit Exploit Collection™ shows that I have 8 exploits for AWStats (the latest being released on the 2006-05-06, for version 6.5 and lower), and 0 for Webalizer. That's actually pretty darn respectable The Webalizer vulnerability linked to in that blog is over 4 years old, provokes a DoS condition only, and never had any exploit written for it anyway. "no shortage of serious security vulnerabilities" my rear.

And in any case, not using software you need simply because it might open up exploit routes for attackers is silly The Shaking Spirit Exploit Collection™ has 21 remote exploits for Apache, but advising people not to make websites because they might be hacked through Apache is ludicrous! Like any server software or web app, make sure to install the latest version, apply patchs/updates the day they're released, and you should be fine Of course, you should have other layers of security, like chroots and IDSs, but I'm going to stop now before I start another security rant

[Karl Buckland]

And as I pointed out, why do you need to have your stats visible to the world? Password protect them, hide them, etc. We don't even have ours on the same server!

[Spode]

Sirkent, on Nov 19 2006, 10:19 AM, said:

And as I pointed out, why do you need to have your stats visible to the world? Password protect them, hide them, etc. We don't even have ours on the same server!

Webalizer produces HTML which is static.

AWStats is written in perl, so there is oppurtunity for abuse. But as SirKent rightly says, password protect it! You could even limit it to your IP address as well if you were feeling that concerned.

I'm still undecided which I prefer - Webalizer or AWSTATS. I'm running them both at the moment, and I'm preferring AW generally (it seems to cut out google bots etc. a lot better).

What you have to remember though is, in your case, it's not really about your actual stats. It's about how many banners you can show to your readers.

So in this case, something like Google Analytics would work well as scenario's described above (no images, partially loaded pages) means you probably wouldn't see a banner either. I'm going to go and have a look at that myself

[Karl Buckland]

Spode, on Nov 21 2006, 11:08 AM, said:

Webalizer produces HTML which is static.

AWStats is written in perl, so there is oppurtunity for abuse. But as SirKent rightly says, password protect it! You could even limit it to your IP address as well if you were feeling that concerned.

It's worth noting that AWStats can also output static HTML, instead of being used via a cgi-bin.

[TJSingleton]

Sirkent, on Nov 8 2006, 05:28 AM, said:

Google Analytics uses tracking tags (such as small images placed somewhere in your HTML) in order to track visitors on your pages. Often this means that search engines, or other bots as well as visitors who don't download images or have javascript turned off, as well as users of some ad blocking software will not be counted in your stats. This also means that Google Analytics normally won't work on intranets, etc. You also want your 'tag' for Google to be as early in the page as possible, otherwise if the user clicks on a link before the page is loaded, the hit may not be counted.

Log analysing is far more reliable as it looks at the server logs and therefore everything is counted.

But, the reason that people like Google Analytics so much is that it makes analysing the data it collects very easy and it shows you trends in an easy to understand manner. There is log analysing software to do that but it costs. The free log analysers aren't bad, but won't do the same detailed analysis that you can get Google (or paid software) to do for you.

The best free software log analysers are (in my opinion) AWStats and Webalizer. Both of those websites have demos so you can see the kind of detail you get.

I would say use a combo of both. There are a lot of things javascript can detect that isn't in the log file. There are things that javascript are going to miss --- (Like the bots)

[ablaye]

As everyone already said, Google analytics is the best there is out of there. Don't waste your time with awstats or webalizer. Google analytics is free and you get many stats that you don't get with awstats or webalizer.

[howtodress123]

I am very impressed by it all. The analysis mode is fantastic and I think this is really gone help me out.

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This post has been edited by howtodress123: 22 August 2011 - 09:33 AM