Web statistics/analytics

[Cliff]

I'm revisiting old habits, as I tend to do from time to time, and am curious what people are using for web trend analysis on their sites.

 

Note one caveat: I distrust google, think that they are the next evil empire, and give them as little personal information as possible.  So google analytics is currently not an option I'm considering.   :)

 

thoughts?  Feedback?  What do you  use and why?    Thanks!

 

-Cliff

 

[Tim Greiser]

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 4:31 PM, Cliff <cgal...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm revisiting old habits, as I tend to do from time to time, and am curious what people are using for web trend analysis on their sites.

 

Note one caveat: I distrust google, think that they are the next evil empire, and give them as little personal information as possible.  So google analytics is currently not an option I'm considering.   :)

I've used webalizer a lot, but honestly it's about as much fun as getting teeth pulled.  Switched to GA about 6 months ago and now have a hard time thinking about using anything else.

Tim.

[nick]

Hey,

at the University we use (you guessed it) Google Analytics we also use
Google's server log analyser Urchin. Both work extremely well for our
needs and users (they over-appreciate the 'Shiny'), and i don't even
mind sharing my data with them...

nick

p.s. Cliff will you be my friend on Google Latitude?

On May 6, 4:45 pm, Tim Greiser <tgrei...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Dan Bowling]

GA here too. On my personal site I have Mint. Love that as well. Very different type of analytics though.

Dan

[Nathan Stephens]

I don't like to bow to the Google gods as well, but if their was something better the GA I'd use it. However, I haven't found it... yet.

Nathan

[nick]

Hey,

as an aside i've used awstats for a bit but the interface/setup was
pretty unpleasant.

nick

On May 7, 1:30 am, Nathan Stephens <nathan.m.steph...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I don't like to bow to the Google gods as well, but if their was something
> better the GA I'd use it. However, I haven't found it... yet.
> Nathan
>
> On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 9:45 PM, Dan Bowling <d...@northlander.org> wrote:
> > GA here too. On my personal site I have Mint. Love that as well. Very
> > different type of analytics though.
> > Dan
>

[Cliff]

Yeah. AWStats has been my fallback for a couple years now. Back when I
started using it, online analytics hadn't really caught on yet and webalizer
hadn't been updated since 2002 and appeared to be dead.

Webalizer appears to be in active development now and projects such as Mint
(which I've used, but not regularly) are rapidly gaining popularity. And
then there is the ubiquity of GA.

For the record, my dislike of GA is not without reason. One is that I've
found its reliance on javascript in many cases results in low metrics,
particularly when trying to determine mobile visits. As mobile browsing
becomes more popular (until non-smartphone browsers support js) this will
increasingly become a problem.

Secondly, because of its ability to pinpoint a *specific* user by using
javascript, there is nothing to stop google from tracking where a user goes
spanning *multiple sites* using GA. The more people that use GA, the better
google can track surfing patterns, and that is the worst kind of privacy
invasion.

Ideally I'd love to see a package that can use cookies to get near GA
quality tracking, but runs locally on the hosted server so tracking that
cookie (or even accessing it) outside of the hosted site is not allowed.
You get GA quality tracking without the privacy or javascript issues. As
far as the "pretty" factor...eh. It is nice, but I use metrics to measure
success, not to make my eyes dance. That could be coded as well.

Hmmm......did I just decide to do a project? Gah! Juggling too many
projects already!!!

-Cliff


--------------------------------------------------
From: "nick" <Jakon...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 8:43 AM
To: "Missoula Web Discussion Group"
<missoula-web-d...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [MWDG] Re: Web statistics/analytics

[nick]

Hey,

i understand your frustrations with Google, but i think it would be a
greater disservice to your client or employer by not using Google
Analytics until there is something better or at least a solid
alternative. It has an unmached ability to produce human (non-
technical) readable reports. This is beyond just the shiny factor. In
my case i need to be able to present reports to a committee, i've
given them reports i've produced from the raw numbers (made in excel),
and i've brought up GA in meetings and shown the data, of course they
responded much better to the report that I didn't spend any time
producing. This may be because they are blinded a bit by the *shine*
but if they will actually look at it and absorb the data, it's worth
it.

Most of the problems you mentioned (aside from googles intrinsic evil)
are because it's based on JS. like i said, we run both GA and Urchin.
we decided that it was not acceptable to rely solely on a JS tracker,
and that a server log parser was a more reliable choice. The
unfortunate part about log parsers, like awstats, is that they are
either expensive or hard to use. we picked Urchin because it was a
good mix of low cost and high feature set. Another important piece of
having a log parser is it will give you far more information, stats on
files like images, js and css are available. it will also give you
information about 404 errors and when/how often your site is getting
crawled.

Nick

> From: "nick" <Jakonavi...@gmail.com>