I'm curious how everyone keeps track of their site's statistics (page views, hits, referers, etc)...

Do you use a script, look at server logs, etc? (I'm not too familiar with what information the server itself keeps track of...)

I've been thinking about trying something with MySQL, but am not sure about the feasibility, as the database would obviously grow very rapidly on a busy site.

Any thoughts?


--
Matt G

Web application provided by my hosting company.

And at my "real" job, we use WebTrends Professional to analyze our traffic logs (and also monitor internal/external links).
========================================
Buh Bye!

Cheers,
Me

Have a look at: http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/analog/. Your logs contain a lot of information, very rarely do you need to log them in mysql or anything else. Just need a good log analyzer program.

Cheers,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.

Here are three reporting pieces of software I see on some of our sites

Analog (url in post above) not much to see just a list of page hits (at least on my version - which I'm sure is low-end shareware).

http://www.boutell.com/wusage/ this one isn't pretty but seems really robust and full of all kinds of stats.

http://www.urchin.com this one "looks" really polished, but doesn't deliver much in substance or functionality, parts of it don't work.

Also keep in mind that stats can be misleading...

Example taken from Analog on a 'dead site' we play with:

-------------------------------------------------
(Figures in parentheses refer to the 7 days to 09-Nov-2001 00:07).
Successful requests: 149 (7)
Average successful requests per day: 6 (0)
Successful requests for pages: 34 (7)
Average successful requests for pages per day: 1 (0)
Failed requests: 3,789 (428)
Redirected requests: 10 (1)
Distinct files requested: 32 (3)
Distinct hosts served: 9 (4)
Data transferred: 356.310 kbytes (2.141 kbytes)
Average data transferred per day: 14.492 kbytes (313 bytes)


At first glance you'd think this site had 149 hits, but when you look further down you see this:

---------------------------------------------
reqs: %bytes: extension
----: ------: ---------
76: 76.87%: .cgi
7: 7.45%: .html [Hypertext Markup Language]
34: 4.85%: .gif [GIF graphics]
4: 4.30%: .htm [Hypertext Markup Language]
1: 2.42%: .jpg [JPEG graphics]
2: 2.12%: .css
23: 1.93%: [directories]
2: 0.06%: [not listed: 2 extensions]

Which totals up to 149! Not exactly 149 unique visitors is it?

Hope you find some of this useful.
Good luck -Mike.

NEIL: You haven't got an MP, Rick. You're an anarchist.
RICK: Oh. Well, then I shall write to the lead singer of Echo and the Bunnymen!

Analog - http://www.analog.cx. Been around for ages and is the de-facto stats analyzer on the web.

- wil

Watts; upgrade to version 5 if you need a fancy graphical interface. There is no low-end shareware to Analog. It's all free :-)

- wil

Hi,

Thanks for all the replies.

Analog looks good... Did I miss something, or is there no "referer" reporting? Seems like it must use the referer to get the "Search Word Report", but I don't see any section "Sites refering the most traffic"...

??

(There were a couple reports "Domain Report" & "Organisation Report" dealing with where traffic is coming from, but I think that was going off the visitor's IP address.)

--
Matt G

Don't forget webalizer