Dynamic Stats

anything worth while?

[seth_wilde]

We're currently using webtrends for our stats and are looking to switch to something that creates the reports on the fly.

I checked out livestats and have some serious problems with their reffer reports. The current version (5.0) doesn't recognize Google (as well as many others) as a SE. Also in the "Keyword Used On *" section rather than keeping the keywords in their orginal search phrase it breaks them up individually (and has no way to see the whole phrase). It looks like the SE problem is fixed in the 6.0 beta but they still don't have any support for whole search phrases.

I also checked out "Webtrends Live" which doesn't have any of the problems of livestats. But you can't run the software yourself. You have to paste javascript on to everypage and you are then charged an amount per page view.

Does anybody have any suggestions or comments about creating stats dynamically?

[4eyes]

I don't know how I missed this post Seth.

I have been looking for something similar, and almost given up.

At present we use webalizer on all our customer accounts, coz it has enough info for most, and keeps the customer happy. But, like yourself, I need something more dynamic.

We have tried Traxis - its brilliant but was difficult for us to set up and as Brett no longer supports it, it is not easily available.

We have been trying out Advlogger, which needs SSI or Javascript on every page.

If we use Webalizer and Advlogger on our 'sensitive' accounts then we get almost everything we need.

I am still open to any other suggestions, though.
Any ideas?

[seth_wilde]

We ended up going with urchin. It's pulls your logs into a database (we have it set up to do it nightly) and then all your stats are available through a dynamic interface. It's definitely one the the best commercial products that I've found (with the help of seo411).

If you want to check out the interface visit
[demo.urchin.com...]

"Brett no longer supports it"
I heard unconfirmed rumors that this may change in the coming months :)

[4eyes]

If Brett does bring back Traxis, and I can get the image call feature working, it will be the answer to all my problems.

Yo Brett, your people need you!

[ggrot]

Ok, I've got a php hand coded tracking system running on a few sites of mine. It uses cookies plus ip's to do session tracking and stores everything in a big normalized mySQL database, completely ignoring the weblogs. For the most part I have a few stored queries for standard stuff and then the occasional custom query I write on the fly. Of course, I don't have any vast amount of traffic on any of these, so I'm not sure if there is any resource intensive problems with this, but it works on the fly, and is extremely flexible.

I've been considering adding some features, a control panel, and other things so that people besides myself could make some sense of the information. I've even tossed the idea around of making it into a publicly available download with a pretty minor fee to cover my effort. The problem, obviously, is time and the fact that Im not sure there would be enough interest. But out of curiosity, if I ever get around to it, what types of reports/features would you all love to see in a tracking system that you've never seen before.

I know I've heard the ability to correlate specific referring url's or search terms with user response (for example a user who comes to your site searching on 'widgets' looks at 12 pages on average and is worth $0.12 in sales on average). Things like that are interesting features that I haven't found elsewhere.