Hits – especially pagehits and not visits – are 20th century stuff to impress suits to get a larger budget. As somebody mentioned before, it’s not about hits anymore, it’s about conversions. However, you seem to have missed a paradigm shift. However they charge you based on traffic, and once I crossed the first threshold (and needed to pay 600 EUR for the upgrade plus 80 EUR for the mandatory maintenance) it seems I reach more and more traffic faster and faster. They take a split approach with setting cookies and tracking IP’s. Webtrends does a pretty good job on differentiating between hits and visits. Client-side logging can be more flexible & gather more information but you have to worry about setting up an extra layer of services to collect them & there's the chance that you might miss some small portion of your traffic.I’m using Webtrends for years, though they are charging an arm and a leg for their software (PLUS the latest release needed outrageously expensive hardware to run on ). Server-side logging always works, regardless of what the client does but, unfortunately, it is only able to gain a limited amount of information from the HTTP request. Also, if you want to correlate multiple sources of data with your web traffic (eg user information from your database), you're going to need to start thinking about a custom solution as well.īeyond the capabilities of the tools, you need to look at the tradeoffs between client and server-side logging. If your site is complicated & has many unconventional user flows (lots of AJAX?) that you'd like to follow, you might not be able to shoehorn things into GA. It's an excellent system that reliably gives you timely insight into user behavior on your website. ![]() If you run a small to medium website and want some generic analytics about your traffic, by all means, throw your data into Google Analytics and never look back. It really comes down to flexibility & the amount of work you want to do. To your site coming from your site), so you can easily track them and fix your site links immediately.Īnalytics: goals, ROI, pingback, maps, and even if you are sending them to your customer for free, what happens if one day Big G tells you that from now on you have to pay for them.requires you to place a snippet of Javascript code in ALL your webisites.very slow to setup an account (slow panel irritating me and wasting my time).Number of visits per day, but they can easily you can setup a recurring email with a snapshot of the Analytics to be sent to your customers.you can setup goals and a bunch of other stuff,.Awstats is based on server log analysis (as you mention in your question), but it shows you result in a graphical form very easy ot read. Google Analaytics can be somehow compared to another graphic tools to analyze your webistes' visists like the excellent Awstats which is included in the vast majority of all hosting plans (comes with cPanel). IMHO comparing Web server logs file analysis to Google Analytics it's like comparing apples to pears.ġ day of server log file can be 1000 text lines to read through or more (depending on the number of visits on your site), this is totally unreadble unless you want to spend the rest of your life analyzing it line by line. As browsers and bots continually change you'll need to make sure you keep this software up to date otherwise you'll have a lot of "unknown" bots and browsers in your stats which isn't particularly helpful. Installing software on web servers, particularly *nix systems, is not for the lighthearted. On the downside if you don't have a server with a pre-installed control panel or want to use a different one then is included you'll have to install one yourself. If you use a web host that provides a basic control panel one of these is usually included so no set up is required. Web based tools like Awstats don't require any client side and thus will offer a complete set of statistics from every user. They also tend to stay on top of updated bot and browser lists which they can apply immediately with no work from you required so their reports are always current. ![]() On the plus side, they are easy to set up as they only require a small snippet of code to be placed in your pages and you're up and running. If the stats provider's server is slow at that moment your page will seem to be slow to the user. They also may slow your site down as the user has to wait for that code to fully download and be parsed fort it to work. ![]() So if a user doesn't have JavaScript enabled your site statistics won't be accurate or complete. Some of them even requires JavaScript to be turned onto function at all. Web based tools like Google Analytics require JavaScript to function completely.
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