Tracking Your Stats With Analytics Software

When I work with my blog and website consulting clients I always ask for some sample stats. You can learn a lot about the health of a site, plus where they might gain more traffic, just by reading their traffic reports. I just received some stats from a client and they came through as screen grabs from a server side service provided by their ISP. It got me wondering what the right reports to use are.

There are two types of stats, broadly, server-side and client-side.

Server-side stats are broken down into “log file analyzers” and “CGI”. Log file analyzers take your web server log text file records that are created any time anything happens on your server, and produce stats from those. CGI type stats record to files or database, but are based on your website software, not the web server.

Client-side stats are things like Google Analytics, where you get given a piece of Javascript code to put into your template so whenever a visitor arrives on a page containing the tracking code, their activity is recorded.

I always recommend you not use server side for measuring your traffic because it includes “bot” traffic and such, so you get an inflated view. Bots are things like search engine spiders that read through your site to add the information into their index so they can find your pages when someone searches. There are also bots that are there to scrape your content to steal it, or to cache it for easier and speedier loading for corporate or ISP level access. This can add up to quite a lot. Because my domain is nearly 10 years old it attracts a LOT of this kind of activity.

For the most part the client-side will be a more realistic view of who is really actually reading your site as it only activates when the javascript or images are loaded in an actual web browser. While a percentage of people can block this code, it is not going to be off by the same amount as server side stats will be.

I can see how you might want to show inflated stats. It would be more persuasive to advertisers for them to think your traffic is double or higher than what it really is, but how many will accept this inflated count and how ethical is it to sell advertising based on visits not even performed by human beings?

Which kind of stats do you use and which do you share? Please let me know in the comments …

Posted on June 10, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Software Tools

Comments

5 Responses to “Tracking Your Stats With Analytics Software”

  1. Louis Liem on June 10th, 2008 1:38 pm

    I use GA. It makes numbers read and understood easily with charts and visuals

  2. Pierre Far on June 10th, 2008 1:41 pm

    How about server-side software with aggressive bot-detecting algos? It’s actually fairly easy to detect most bots, even “stealth” ones that don’t identify themselves as bots.

    The other way to think about it is via trends: what is the growth in RSS requests? What growth is there in subscriber counts do Google Reader/Bloglines/Newsgator/etc give in the user agent? How many times is a certain page requested per month over the past X months? You can get trends from both client-side and server-side analytics and they should correlate fairly well. Any discrepancies should be double-checked.

    We can also go for SEO trends to gauge health of a site: Number of links over time, or number of mentions of the site over time, rise/fall in SERPs for key query phrases, and others. These are softer metrics that are very likely to give wrong results on their own, but when pieced with other evidence, can polish off the picture with more details.

    Over all, a believable growth in many metrics tells you the site is healthy and growing. Otherwise, something is wrong…

    Pierre

  3. Ulla on June 10th, 2008 2:21 pm

    I use google analytics and I am still discovering its possibilities…
    Ulla

  4. Chris Garrett on June 10th, 2008 2:45 pm

    @Louis - GA rocks, even more now it is free, I used to love it when it was Urchin

    @Pierre - I guess if you can stop all the junk then server side is cool. I like the immediacy of client side though. Trends are an important aspect, yeah, measure against yourself rather than others, just like at the gym :)

    @Ulla - And the features are growing better too

  5. Dawn @ Coming to a Nursery Near You on June 11th, 2008 7:01 pm

    I love stats! I use what comes with wp stats as a basic idea of traffic, but I use my cpanel stats to really see things like search terms, referrers, etc. This new thing, Woopra, looks promising as well. I have been designing sites for about 10 years, so stats have always been my hangup. Finding a GOOD stat program has been like a search for the Holy Grail lol

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