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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Stat Tracking for Web Projects

I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that I’m not always using the best soft­ware for mon­i­tor­ing stats for web sites (and by stats I mean any­thing from hits to refer­rers to user pat­terns, and every­thing in between and on each side), includ­ing per­sonal projects such as this site, and com­mer­cial projects for clients. I’ve tried built-in log-analysis offer­ings from var­i­ous hosts (e.g. Webal­izer), as well as free scripts such as Shaun Inman’s Short­Stat and Dean Allen’s Refer (usu­ally com­bi­na­tions of more than one such appli­ca­tion and/or script), some of which pro­vide use­ful infor­ma­tion, but I’m not entirely con­vinced that I’ve found the cor­rect col­lec­tion of tools to eval­u­ate and mon­i­tor (and allow clients to do like­wise) web site sta­tis­tics.

So my ques­tion is this:

What scripts/applications/solutions do you or your com­pany use to mon­i­tor and eval­u­ate sta­tis­tics for your own web projects and for your clients?

I’ll com­pile and post my thoughts after I fin­ish eval­u­at­ing any and all sug­ges­tions, but the com­ments for this post will remain open for as long as I can put up with the comment-spam, so keep your sug­ges­tions com­ing, thanks!

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Monday, January 10th, 2005.

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45 comments on “Stat Tracking for Web Projects”

  1. Posted by Ryan Prins on Monday, January 10th, 2005.

    I’ve used bbclone on my site for some basic stats and I’ve been pleased. It is pretty sim­ple, so it might not be what you are look­ing for, but it is worth a look.

  2. Posted by Jeremy Flint on Monday, January 10th, 2005.

    I use Refer and Short­stat, but with the recent increase in refer spam, I don’t really count on those to be as reli­able as they once were. I have 2 or 3 stat pro­grams avail­able from my host, and usu­ally end up going with the reports that AWStats spits out just because I like the orga­ni­za­tion of it.

    For our clients, we usu­ally down­load their raw log files and run them through a local instal­la­tion of Webal­izer here at the office. That way we can fil­ter out stuff if we need to, such as the clients IP range for more accu­rate exter­nal stats.

  3. Posted by Mark on Monday, January 10th, 2005.

    I use Urchin and it’s more than capa­ble of the more detailed reports you seem to be look­ing for.

  4. Posted by Seb on Monday, January 10th, 2005.

    I’ve recently found awstats and have been very impressed by it…

  5. Posted by Byron McCollum on Monday, January 10th, 2005.

    We use Urchin, but it is a com­mer­cial package…

    And it is Shaun Inman…

  6. Posted by Dan Bowling on Monday, January 10th, 2005.

    I use AWStats, and I highly recomend it. It is easy to use, shows graphs where they are needed (and not where they are not). The only prob­lem I notice is that it counts hits to include files just like a reg­u­lar page, and that querey dri­ven pages are not track­able (as it only deals with sta­tic info).

  7. Posted by Jeff Minard on Monday, January 10th, 2005.

    If you are in to Webal­izer, you will defi­nately wan’t to check out Web­Druid. It is based on Webal­izer, but also returns some super sweet user path charts that just blew me away.

    Oh yeah, it’s writ­ten in C and so it took about 13 sec­onds to parse what AWStats went though in 45 minutes. ;-)

  8. Posted by Dan Rubin on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005.

    #5 — Thanks for the spellcheck Byron, I was writ­ing a con­tract today for some­one named “Shawn” and must have typed it 20 times through­out the day, and my fin­gers were on their own :) I’ve cor­rected his name in the post.

  9. Posted by Piet on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005.

    pphlog­ger is a nice one and very extensive..

  10. Posted by Joerg Petermann on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005.

    ProNet: Nick O´Neill is work­ing on a vis­i­tor sta­tis­tics plu­gin for Mov­able Type (MTStats). [Beta-Testing]

  11. Posted by Emilio on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005.

    For my site stats, and on other small projects I use the sim­ple AXS.

    On big­ger com­mer­cial projects I worked with Red­sh­er­iff, but it’s another, costly, universe ;-)

  12. Posted by Byron McCollum on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005.

    @Dan Rubin: No prob­lem. Even though I have known Shaun since col­lege, I too am guilty of flub­bing his name, mainly due to my boss’s name being Sean…

  13. Posted by Gilbert Lee on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005.

    Stat­Counter . It’s free and suf­fi­cient for smaller sites.

  14. Posted by Gilbert Lee on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005.

    Strange…that link doesn’t work for some rea­son. Try this: How Stat­Counter Works.

  15. Posted by Stephanie on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005.

    Urchin. Wouldn’t give it up for the world.

  16. Posted by Ratzo on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005.

    For my site I use Php-stats. It’s sim­ple to install and offers very detailed information.

  17. Posted by Sharaf Atakhanov on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005.

    I use http://webstat.com/. It is inex­pen­sive, only $9.95/month and has amaz­ing detailed reports that you can export to PDF, Excel and even send as an attachment.

    Also, you can track GoogAd Words or other cam­paigns sep­a­rately which is great.

    You can try it for free for 14 days.

    No need to buy expen­sive license or install any soft­ware on the server.

    Good luck.

    –S

  18. Posted by jc on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005.

    I’ve used a http://www.reinvigorate.net/system/ as a pretty, open source, alter­na­tive. No heavy lift­ing here.

  19. Posted by Brian Behrend on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005.

    I’ve been very sat­is­fied with AWStats as well. Sim­ple and clean. The charts make it real easy to get overview just at a glance.

  20. Posted by Jeff Croft on Wednesday, January 12th, 2005.

    Shaun is work­ing on a new ver­sion of Short­Stat that is absolutely bril­liant. I’ve been beta test­ing it for him, and I can tell you that it blows the socks off the old ver­sion. I’ve not used a lot of other apps, but I sure love this one!

  21. Posted by Sean Scott on Wednesday, January 12th, 2005.

    Well it depends on the type of client. If it is any­thing seri­ous (i.e. enter­prise level) then i sug­gest get­ting web­trends from netIQ.

    It will put those other pakcages to shame, but it comes with a pric­etag. as they say you pay for what you get…

  22. Posted by Cody Lindley on Wednesday, January 12th, 2005.

    In Order…

    Big Bucks To Spend:
    Site­cat­a­lyst
    Web­side Story
    Urchin
    Web Trends
    Click Tracks

    Price mat­ters:
    Web Stat
    Stat Counter

  23. Posted by Valentin Agachi on Thursday, January 13th, 2005.

    Per­son­ally, I use on many web sites my own traf­fic log­ger built in my cus­tomized CMS.

    On com­er­cial sites or big­ger clients, I use a local stats log­ger provider ser­vice (Trafic.ro).

    I think for any site you wish to have some real­is­tic stats data and choose to use the ser­vices of some com­pany, it is bet­ter to use a provider either from your coun­try, or at least one that will have a very low-response time to the major­ity of your web site vis­i­tors. What I mean is you shouldn’t use a company’s ser­vices, if it is located on another con­ti­nent then user target.

  24. Posted by Goran Aničić on Thursday, January 13th, 2005.

    I sug­gest free “Fun­nel Web Analyser” > http://www.quest.com

  25. Posted by jtharnthong on Thursday, January 13th, 2005.

    I use TFS­tats. Works well for me, fast and sim­ple with good analy­sis. http://www.oplossing.net/

  26. Posted by Ireney Berezniak on Saturday, January 15th, 2005.

    I use WebLog Expert for per­sonal stat gen­er­a­tion. I love it. Pro­vides stan­dard reports — hits and vis­i­tor counts, refer­rers, hosts, browsers, enter/exit pages etc. — plus var­i­ous fil­ter capa­bil­i­ties allow­ing to include or exclude spec­i­fied fil­ter­ing cri­te­ria, or track­ing par­tic­u­lar files. Also, some nice extras include the abil­ity to sched­ule report gen­er­a­tion, and to e-mail and/or ftp the gen­er­ated result to desired des­ti­na­tion, for instance. Not only that, the tool can also down­load logs via http or ftp.

    One may gen­er­ate reports encom­pass­ing all logged activ­ity, or var­i­ous sub­sets. Fur­ther­more, it is pos­si­ble to spec­ify a time range of the activ­ity to be ana­lyzed. Quite nice … a snap too install, sim­ple to use, and rel­a­tively fast. Fre­quently updated as well … lat­est beta con­tains export functionality(CSV and PDF).

    WebLog Expert sup­ports IIS and Apache logs, though this is a Win­dows client only. Comes in two flavours: free­ware Lite ver­sion, and full 30-day free trial pay version.

    While much of the func­tion­al­ity this tool pro­vides is overkill for my per­sonal needs, it is cer­tainly a great option for cor­po­rate use.

    ib.

  27. Posted by Bryan on Sunday, January 16th, 2005.

    The com­pany I work for uses Web Ana­lyt­ics with http://247media.com/ for user and behav­ior track­ing. Costs quite a bit, but it helps us ana­ly­ize web users and their move­ments quite effectively.

  28. Posted by Scott Kidder on Monday, January 17th, 2005.

    I really like Click­Tracks (http://www.clicktracks.com). It’s stat soft­ware made for marketers.

    For $500, you can run as many log files as you want. It’s great value-added for your clients.

    s

  29. Posted by Amit Karmakar on Friday, January 21st, 2005.

    I have tried refer for a while and i didnt find it very handy. Left a few emails with the author regard­ing refer spam­ming, not once did I get a reply. Later I tried Short­stats ( a lot bet­ter) and awstats too.

    Hav­ing moved my host­ing with Seg­pub I got urchin as a part of the host­ing pack­age. Urchin is a really good prod­uct and does web­stats to a great depth. The only down­side is its a com­mer­cial prod­uct and too expen­sive invest­ing for per­sonal use. If i didnt have urchin i would rely more on short­stats more than any­thing else. Although, I would rec­om­mend pass­word pro­tect­ing stats, It helps cut down a lot of unwanted spam­mers and band­width crawlers.

  30. Posted by Jennifer Grucza on Friday, January 28th, 2005.

    For my per­sonal site, I just use awstats, which comes with the hosting.

    My com­pany uses Net­Tracker, which I don’t think any­one else men­tioned. I don’t know how much it costs, but it’s very pow­er­ful — you can do all sorts of cus­tom reports. The UI could be a lit­tle bet­ter, but it’s usable.

  31. Posted by Roland on Monday, January 31st, 2005.

    I used http://www.xiti.com for some time.
    It’s a com­mer­cial service.

  32. Posted by Nick on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005.

    I work for a large uni­ver­sity, and while we wait for our insti­tu­tional log analy­sis soft­ware to be imple­mented on our web server, we’ve been run­ning 123 Log Ana­lyzer on local machines. It’s not the great­est soft­ware availalbe, but offers good func­tion­al­ity with a decent inter­face for a rea­son­able price.

    I’ve also used Urchin on sev­eral servers, which is a pretty slick package.

  33. Posted by Sascha on Monday, February 7th, 2005.

    Maybe you should check out Hot­Tracker. Its also avail­able in a free ASP ver­sion (but a com­mer­cial ser­vice — pric­ing depends on num­ber of page impres­sions). Using pixel (aka web­bug) tech­nol­ogy has many advan­tages over log­file analy­sis (prox­ies, track­ing over mul­ti­ple web­sites
    and many more…). You can visit a demo and sign up for a free and unlim­ited (time) test-drive.

  34. Posted by Miles on Wednesday, February 16th, 2005.

    My site has not yet opened, but Glo­bat pro­vides awstats for me. How­ever, it is kind of a bunch of raw data just piled together in a totally unor­ga­nized manner.

    I like all the data that it gives me, but I wish it would orga­nize it more.

    I will prob­a­bly end up imple­ment­ing my own log­ging sys­tem. How­ever, I don’t really need it for a while, and it’s kind of going to be some­thing I’ll be work­ing on over an extended period of time.

    Hope­fully, it will fea­ture nice lit­tle things such as search engine crawl­ing activ­ity, search engine rank­ing, user paths, user refer­rers, most used image, etc..

  35. Posted by Ryan Heneise on Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005.

    Has any­one tried Web CEO? I’m won­der­ing specif­i­cally about their HitLens fea­ture. How does it stack up against Click­Tracks, Urchin, et al.?

  36. Posted by jaffry on Sunday, February 27th, 2005.

    i’ve used the Perl-based AXS for a while and it’s been pretty use­ful. but i haven’t really fig­ured out how to track more than one page with AXS.

    rein­vig­o­rate is open-source & it’s great but it’s down now.

  37. Posted by battlemouth on Monday, March 7th, 2005.

    i would rec­comend http://www.statcounter.com
    its what i use for all my sta­tis­ti­cal needs

  38. Posted by Netlash Webdesign on Monday, March 7th, 2005.

    For basis stats, I’m using AWStats.

    But recently, I’ve dis­cov­ered MyBlogLog (http://www.mybloglog.com/), which tracks your out­go­ing links. It’s an amaz­ing tool.

  39. Posted by Justin Perkins on Monday, March 7th, 2005.

    At my place of work, we use a highly grain­u­lar, amaz­ingly pow­er­ful web­site analy­sis tool by the folks at Omni­ture ( http://www.omniture.com/ ). IMO, this is the best reporting/analysis I have ever seen/used. There is noth­ing you can­not due using the web­site analy­sis tool Site Cat­a­lyst. The high cost lim­its their usage to pro­fes­sional, e-commerice dri­ven web­sites, but if that is what you have, I wouldn’t rec­om­mend any­thing else.

    For per­sonal web­sites and web­sites I pro­duce for per­sonal clients, I just go with the quite lim­ited AW Stats which is free and quite lack­ing in grain­u­lar analy­sis of any kind.

  40. Posted by Mike on Friday, March 11th, 2005.

    I’ve been using Track­Pro on most of my recent projects (http://www.curve2.com/trackpro2.php). Its got tons of dif­fer­ent sta­tis­tics sum­maries, and its free.

  41. Posted by David Mead on Wednesday, March 16th, 2005.

    I’ve always found Sawmill to be very good and flexible.

    They also offer a free license if you keep track of how you used it.

  42. Posted by Rafi B. on Saturday, March 19th, 2005.

    For all you ASP’ers out there:
    I’ve been using the awe­some Stat­Coun­teX for 3 years, an open-source ASP real-time sta­tis­tics server. How­ever, I totally re-wrote the code and added awe­some new fea­tures, like imple­ment­ing flash charts using fusionCharts.

    open-source project home­page:
    http://www.2enetworx.com/dev/projects/statcountex.asp
    an exam­ple of many of avail­able plu­g­ins:
    http://www.digitalusmedia.com/go/flash-statcountex-media.html
    exam­ple in action:
    http://www.flaviobonomini.it/publicstatcountex/reportpathy.asp
    the awe­some fusion­Charts LITE (free!) (their not really b/w btw):
    http://www.infosoftglobal.com/FusionCharts/Lite/Gallery.asp

  43. Posted by harold goldstein on Friday, April 1st, 2005.

    open­web­scope is $99, we run it locally, can run unlim­ited log files … see nycsoftware.com.

    we find it very felx­i­ble and pro­vides all the basic stuff fil­tered any which way.

  44. Posted by George Smith on Monday, April 4th, 2005.

    I use Net­Tracker Lite, its free.

  45. Posted by Jenni on Friday, April 22nd, 2005.

    my vote is for http://www.statcounter.com too, it gives me all the infor­ma­tion I need, and I can even down­load it in a cvs or excel file! It’s free, but I think if you pay ($25 a year…?) you can get a few more things.