What is the best choice today regarding log analysis software?

Log analysis tools for webmasters of several sites?

[pvdm]

Hi,

I have searched Webmasterworld on this subject and read this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

I thought it would be great to update the situation. It seems a lot has changed in this market.

What would be the best choice for a webmaster who want to analyse the logs of several customer's websites?

Would it be best to download their logs and analyse them locally? What would be the best choice(s) today?

[tedster]

track from site entry point to sale

That's a job much better done with cookies, IMO. The AOL visitors alone are good enough reason. A server log analysis can really get counfounded by those dynamic IP addresses.

[Mikkel Svendsen]

I completely agree, Tedster. IP's is the least precise method to determine unique users. You mention AOL as an example but what about all the users you have visiting though other proxys? One IP on the proxy could be used by many people - and do.

Coockies is better but still not perfect (nothing is perfect in web-statstistics :)) If you target school kids and teenagers cookies is not very precise as they move a lot around. They acces the web from home, from school (maybe even from a notebook), from after-school activites and from several friends. So one person could activate multiple cookies and one cookies could be used by many friends (on the same computer). So for this cookies is not very precise.

The most precise (but still not 100%) is log in. If you count the number of passowrd protected log ins you will have a better count but still you cannot expect it to be 100% correct. Let's say it's a bank. I know of several families where husbond and wife share the same online bank account and there is no way to know (from logiles) if its the husbond or wife that has logged in.

[dwhite]

Has anyone tried AXS?
It's incredibly easy to install (site does it for you optionally), and presents the stats via a webpage in your cgi-bin. The homepage is:
[xav.com ]

[Black Knight]

There's an Apache mod that writes your logs to an SQL database (MySQL by default, I think) which seems like an excellent solution. Once your logs are actually in an SQL database, you should be able to grab as much or as little detail as you like from your own customised SQL queries. A system that lets you define your own reports in whatever details you want. Best of all, it is of course free.

Anyone tried it? Any major limitations (apart from the lack of a built-in dns system)?

[Jaze]

RE: Mikkel_Svendsen

Cookies - not forgetting those people who deny all cookies (or select which cookies to store)

Problem with logging in is that you'll be excluding search engine spiders from site and hence you'll lose traffic from search engines...

Remember: "Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital" - Aaron Levenstein (Nature Genetics 24:11, January 2000)

[martin]

>There's an Apache mod that writes your logs to an SQL database

Can you specify which module. I only found mod_status which is for displaying current usage stats and things like that but not logging.

[Bernie]

If you have running PHP and MySQL on your webserver anyway, I would give [phpopentracker.de...] a chance.
pos:
- free
- can be configured in almost any way
- running - once installed on webserver for multible domains
- is not based on the logfile but any page will be tracked by a php-include source-code-block.
- can be extended

neg:
- requires php-programming skills to configure

With some programming around phpOpentracker we could make it possible to track the referrer of a visitor entering the page at any place in the website, comparing the referrer-string to a referrer-group (e.g. google or overture or banner xy) and adding the corresponding referrer-group-id to the session-id phpopentracker adds to any visitor as a standard procedure. once the visitor does a sale or lead, the session-id with the referrer-id is tracked from the response-page. with that you can find out the conversion-rate according to different ads and comparing e.g. the conversion-rate of visitors coming from google to the once coming from overture.

the only problem is that we sometimes loose leads/sales in the tracking process if e.g. the session-id is cut off.

at the moment we are thinking about changing to cookies instead of session-id. So what's your opinion about reliability of cookies?

[mnorton]

That Apache Module to log to a SQL database is

mod_log_sql

Thanks

Mike

[Black Knight]

Sorry not to have given the relevant URLs to go with the Apache mods

[grubbybaby.com...] is the standard mod that writes the logs to a MySQL database

[digitalstratum.com...] is a similar mod, but writes to a postgreSQL database instead, for those who prefer that flavour.

I'd still like to know if anyone has direct experience of these types of solutions...

[Martin_H]

Will WebLog Expert track mutliple sites on our server? I want a program that will track multiple sites on our dedicated server and allow me to send custom reports to clients, or alow them to log in themselves to check stats.

We currently use sawmill - but it is crashing out our server when we compile the stats at midnight each night. The answer of course might be to get a more pwerful server, but the costs are quite high for us.

Just your thoughts on some very good multiple site/single server tracking software would be grat.

Thanks

M

[cynicsmart]

clicktracks (www.clicktracks.com)

It's affordable ($495)
It's flexible
It doesn't give you a bunch of stuff you don't need.
It was actually written by the guy who wrote analog?

My clients love it...mainly because when I show them the results, they understand them.

--cyn