My history with AWStats 

For years now, I’ve used AWStats to help understand my site traffic; how many people are visiting, what pages are getting visited, and what search terms they’re using to find my site. If you’ve never used AWStats before, it’s a pretty typical web log analysis tool that parses your server logs every night, and produces a series of reports that detail the various things I mentioned above.

But therein lies it’s two downfalls:

1. AWStats generates its statistics by looking at your server logs. Because it parses server logs, it cannot provide metrics on anything that isn’t stored in the logs. This includes tracking links that your visitors clicked on, tracking user browser resolutions and bandwidth, and an assortment of other client-side facts.
2. AWStats refreshes it’s stats every night. When tweaking ad campaigns and landing pages, writing blog posts, and adding new links to my sites, I want to be able to know exactly what’s going on in real-time. And, waiting til the next day just isn’t good enough; it simply causes me to make too many guesses and assumptions.

(Okay, I know you can change how often AWStats runs, but my web host has it scheduled to run once a day, at night.)

3-day trial with MyBlogLog

I recently signed up for MyBlogLog a few days ago and one of the services that I started to make use of immediately was it’s Statistics service. Pop in a little bit of javascript on your website and it’ll start tracking in real-time site visitors, what pages they viewed, how often pages were viewed, and what links your visitors clicked on (including Google AdSense links!). Although they only provide a 3-day trial on the service, I found myself practically refreshing the stats page every few hours to see what was new. I found that I really enjoyed having all this knowledge at my finger tips.

Now, on to Google Analytics

Well, that 3-day trial is ending today, and I can’t imagine just going back to AWStats, so I’m giving Google Analytics a shot. I’d known of it’s existance for a long time, even when it was still called Urchin, but had never bothered looking into it. So far, I’m pleased with what I see, especially with a feature called Site Overlay. It’s truly amazing. When you click on the Site Overlay link in Google Analytics, it opens up a new browser window and points the browser to your website. Then, on a translucent overlay of your website, it shows you exactly what links are being clicked and how often. It might even provide more info, but I’m still investigating all of the options and functions that this tool has.

Open questions:

• What analysis tool are you using on your website?
• What does it do well, and what does it do poorly?

Related posts:

1. AWStats on TextDrive
2. End of Term Co-op Project: Google Suggest-like Web Control
3. Two weeks later, Firefox referrals have increased by 1000%
4. Update on Text-Link-Ads: Over $70 per month, no work
5. Google Dance is finishing up; SERP’s are coming back!