Analyzing your site logs

[Zygoot]

Which webstats software do you use for your websites?

I'm currently using AW Stats but I think it's lacking a few features. For instance the ability to see exactly where your visitors are coming from. And the ability to see which pages your visitors are visiting.

Does anyone know a good free program or is the thing I'm looking for only available for hard cash?

[BwanaZulia]

You could always try analog.

It is very very very customizable.

BZ

[CanadianChris]

"Advance Logger" is what we use. It's free, small, and extremely efficient :) Does wonders.

All it requires is a simple javascript include on all the pages you want to log :) Takes about 15 mins to configure on any server.

[sandor]

have always used webtrends ... taken its output with a 'grain of salt' though

[Zygoot]

Currently I also use a Nedstat basic counter to check where my visitors are coming from. I do this because AWStats does not tell me from which sites my last x visitors were coming.

Which alternatives can be recommended?

[SeanW]

I use webalizer. It has good referral stats, including tracking keywords people used to find you. Search around on the net, there are some sites that have updated configs to get this information from some of the lesser known engines.

I also have some custom perl stuff. For a while I was interested in knowing when spiders were hitting my site, so I whipped up some code to do that.

The only thing I've found webaliaser doesn't do is tracking length of visits. I think awstats does that, though. That said, while evaluating some stats packages for my day job, we found a huge descrepency in that metric across several packages analyzing the same log.

Sean

[euripydes]

Weblog expert. There's a free (lite) version but the paid-version is pretty reasonable even for a small site.

[rfung]

What kind of analysis do you guys do with your weblogs? the only thing I do is look for which keywords are bringing users to my site. Anything else or more complex I ought to be doing?

[SeanW]

Anything else or more complex I ought to be doing?

In addition to keywords, as you mentioned, I'm also interested in the top entry pages (in webalizer terms). i.e., what page are people seeing first. For one site in particular, a FAQ, I'll intersect that with the keywords just to see what sort of stuff I can be adding.

Sean