web stats monitoring
Discussion
Anybody use them, and what for? I use the free one www.statcounter.com
I use it to see where the visitor has come from and how they arrive at our site (ie search engine and what terms they use)and how much time they spend and which pages they arrive and exit through. I am sure other charging stats providers would give you more detail.
Occassionally (like today) I can see a potential customer checking us out for a contract tender which suggests we are still in the race, and had one US visitor who I tracked to some sort of internet names site in Washinton (not our business area) which suggests we are being sued for something or someone wants our web address I guess.
What can you tell by the length of visists? Many visits are recordd as Zero seconds in length on our site. Is that the time they spend on the arrival page or the total time on the site ( I would have though just opening and closing the site would register more than a second)?
I use it to see where the visitor has come from and how they arrive at our site (ie search engine and what terms they use)and how much time they spend and which pages they arrive and exit through. I am sure other charging stats providers would give you more detail.
Occassionally (like today) I can see a potential customer checking us out for a contract tender which suggests we are still in the race, and had one US visitor who I tracked to some sort of internet names site in Washinton (not our business area) which suggests we are being sued for something or someone wants our web address I guess.
What can you tell by the length of visists? Many visits are recordd as Zero seconds in length on our site. Is that the time they spend on the arrival page or the total time on the site ( I would have though just opening and closing the site would register more than a second)?
Edited by Brown and Boris on Thursday 1st May 11:22
aw stats is pretty good, webalyser is also OK. Usually provided free with most hosting. They are used to monitor traffic, entry / exit pages, inbound links etc.
Ok, as long as your log file is not massive otherwise the browser may just timeout.
The 1 second visits may be from search engines, but Jamie is the man to ask. He will be here soon.
Ok, as long as your log file is not massive otherwise the browser may just timeout.
The 1 second visits may be from search engines, but Jamie is the man to ask. He will be here soon.
Edited by jamesuk28 on Thursday 1st May 11:53
check out http://www.crazyegg.com
They have the potential to show you more about what a user is doing with your site (also great to check how effective any redesigns are etc). However, be careful where in the page you add analytics scripts and how many, as it/they can affect page load times which may put a potential customer off.
They have the potential to show you more about what a user is doing with your site (also great to check how effective any redesigns are etc). However, be careful where in the page you add analytics scripts and how many, as it/they can affect page load times which may put a potential customer off.
Edited by ingelow on Thursday 1st May 13:04
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
You do need to mess about with perl & some bat files though. This is it live for our corporate site.
You do need to mess about with perl & some bat files though. This is it live for our corporate site.
Brown and Boris said:
Anybody use them, and what for? I use the free one www.statcounter.com
I use it to see where the visitor has come from and how they arrive at our site (ie search engine and what terms they use)and how much time they spend and which pages they arrive and exit through. I am sure other charging stats providers would give you more detail.
Occassionally (like today) I can see a potential customer checking us out for a contract tender which suggests we are still in the race, and had one US visitor who I tracked to some sort of internet names site in Washinton (not our business area) which suggests we are being sued for something or someone wants our web address I guess.
What can you tell by the length of visists? Many visits are recordd as Zero seconds in length on our site. Is that the time they spend on the arrival page or the total time on the site ( I would have though just opening and closing the site would register more than a second)?
Statcounter is ok for what it is, but the free version cannot hold more than the last 100 page loads which is useless for a busy site.I use it to see where the visitor has come from and how they arrive at our site (ie search engine and what terms they use)and how much time they spend and which pages they arrive and exit through. I am sure other charging stats providers would give you more detail.
Occassionally (like today) I can see a potential customer checking us out for a contract tender which suggests we are still in the race, and had one US visitor who I tracked to some sort of internet names site in Washinton (not our business area) which suggests we are being sued for something or someone wants our web address I guess.
What can you tell by the length of visists? Many visits are recordd as Zero seconds in length on our site. Is that the time they spend on the arrival page or the total time on the site ( I would have though just opening and closing the site would register more than a second)?
Edited by Brown and Boris on Thursday 1st May 11:22
The zero length visits will be those where the user did not click on anything. Statcounter and most other stat programs can only see when a page has been loaded. It cannot tell how long the user spent looking at that page - i.e. it cannot tell if a user has closed a page down as this does not generally trigger a page load that Statcounter can record. The only way it can tell when a user stops looking at a page is if it detects that that same user has clicked on something else. The time in between those two events gives it the length of the page 'view'. If there is no other page view, then it just records it as a zero length visit.
Statcounter, being a client side script, cannot record visits by search engine spiders as those never run Javascript, and Statcounter relies on javascript to detect users. To see the visits by search engine spiders and other bots, you'll need to look at the server side stats as presented by the likes of Webaliser and AW Stats.
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