__/ [Adam Risser] on Friday 14 October 2005 15:06 \__
> Hi Everybody,
>
> I have started working for a university and am looking for a free
> statistics program. The problem I have is not finding stat programs,
> but knowing what features are a "must have". What web statistics do
> you find most useful? I know statistics like browser, OS, and what
> search engine people are using are important, but what other statistics
> do you guys use that you find extremely helpful.
I find the following important (ordered by precedence albeit quite roughly):
* UIP (Unique IP's - esp. if you have RSS feeds)
* Separation between crawlers and humans (one which has a notion of /new/
crawlers as well)
* Referrer listings
* Search strings and keywords
Toy features:
* Number of additions to one's bookmark (estimated)
* Popular pages or files (also quite a necessity)
* Filetypes breakdown
* Graphs (depending on your volume, e.g. spikes, uniform traffic...)
* Countries breakdown
What I do not mention, I rarely ever find useful, even as a toy. Spending
time on bandwidth count, for instance, is somewhat of a luxury.
> I'm thinking along
> the lines of tracking the path a user takes to certain pages and such.
Look at your logs, possibly at recent visitors. Something that is more of an
'inter-visitor' behavioural pattern is hard to achieve. Visit duration is
as close as it gets I'd say, but that's unreliable since it depends on file
requests (hits)... unless some process tracks the users and 'calls back
home'.
> The stat program I am looking at right now is AWstats.
I love AWStats. I have Analog and Webalizer logs generated every night, but
I never bother to look at them. They barely ever contribute anything that
AWStats does not already, often in much better (e.g. concise) ways.
To analyse Google-specific behaviour, I sometimes use Visitors, which I run
locally.
> Any feedback is appreciated, Thanks!
> Adam
Hope it helps,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | "Stand for nothing and you will fall for anything"
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