Topic: A Great Way to Get Detailed Site Stats

[anvana]

I discovered this last week, found it valuable, and thought I would pass it along....

The wonderful folks at Google have provided a great, free service that allows you to get detailed stats about your web site. While many of us already have a method of tracking visitors to our sites, adding this service to your pages can fill in any missing information your stats programs doesn't provide.

Also, those who use free web services from their ISP do not have any method of tracking visitors other than some sort of hit counter. This service can give you the details you might be looking for.

The service is called Google Analytics (http://google.com/analytics) and it is a FREE service. All you need to do is create an account and add one line of JavaScript code to the bottom of pages you wish to track. It takes about 2 minutes to set this up on your site if you use a common footer file for all your site pages. Once set up on your site, Google begins displaying results for your pages in about 24 hours.

I've set this up on my own site recently and found that it works really well. It's easy to make sense of the charts and numbers Google generates. I use it in combination with the stats programs my host provides to get additional information the server stats don't provide me with.

One feature I found interesting about Google Analytics is that it breaks down my visitors by state and even city - something my current stats program doesn't have the ability to do.

[up10ad N9RJH]

...One feature I found interesting about Google Analytics is that it breaks down my visitors by state and even city ...

Analytics is a great program, but read the city stats with a bit of caution, they probably use IP geo-locations data which isn't very accurate.  Unless thing have changed recently, it puts most of AOL visitors in Virginia because that is where AOL is located.  It puts all of my NC Telecom customers in Denver because that is where we buy our feed and get our IP addresses.

[tinplate]

Google-Analytics is pretty cool, but it has one drawback. It doesn't count everybody, so it's incomplete. Many people (like me) have javascript disabled for all but approved sites. There is a freeware program that is quite polished and feature rich, that can be configured to automatically download your raw log files and construct quite a few interesting displays and graphs. Since it works off the raw log files, it is a complete record. Here's the link:
http://www.quest.com/funnel-web-analyzer/

Steve

[MesquiteWx]

Google-Analytics is nice. I have been using it since it came out I guess over a year ago now or 2006 I think. The locations can not be that accurate sometimes as noted. It will sometimes plot the location of where the users ISP server is, not where they are actually from. Even though someone might have javascript disabled it will still count them because the code is not an active javascript function. It is just a tracking code. Even if it doesn't pick them up the people who have this disabled is few and far between IMO.

[tinplate]

Google Analytics does use javascript. It's in urchin.js. There are several ways that Analytics will be blocked - disabled javascript, blocked cookies (although I think this blocks Google's tracking of your cross-site/cross-page browsing more than generation of hit data on a particular page). Analytics can also be blocked via the hosts file by basically routing the google analytics domain to the bit bucket. It can also be blocked using the AdBlock Firefox plug-in.

Probably more computers than you think block google analytics either intentionally, or more commonly, simply as a side effect of the security policy configured into the  machine and browser.

Each method (log files or script+cookie) has its advantages and disadvantages. With log files, some traffic from bots will be disguised sufficiently to end up in your statistics, and people with rapidly changing IP addresses will show up as multiple viewers. With something like Google Analytics, you the two problems just mentioned will be small or non-existent, but some portion of your traffic will simply not show up, and there is no easy way to find out how much is slipping through.

Steve

[anchorageweather]

Google-Analytics is pretty cool, but it has one drawback. It doesn't count everybody, so it's incomplete. Many people (like me) have javascript disabled for all but approved sites. There is a freeware program that is quite polished and feature rich, that can be configured to automatically download your raw log files and construct quite a few interesting displays and graphs. Since it works off the raw log files, it is a complete record. Here's the link:
http://www.quest.com/funnel-web-analyzer/

Steve

Does anyone know if this will work with a host like e-rice?

[jmcmurry]

Yes, it works with E-Rice logs just fine.  You must download a copy of the file for the analysis though.

- Jim