website traffic monitor or Web Counter.... Thunderstats??

edited June 2008 in Chit chat
I am looking for a solution for my website to act as a web counter and general monitoring tool.

I would like to know what sections of the site are visited most frequently and maybe produce a chart the users can see.

I would also like a counter to be placed on the main page, registering visitors to the site. I.e., when someone hits any page the site the counter goes up, however if they move from one page to another it does not.

What solutions are there for web counting and traffic monitoring. I understand that the Thunderstats thing Majtin was doing is now not open the public.

I have seen Google Analytics but I'm not sure how I can integrate this with my site other than getting external reports. I'm also a bit perturbed to let Google at my site.

PS: MY server is PhP enabled.
Post edited by Scottie_uk on
Calling all ASCII Art Architects Visit the WOS Wall of Text and contribute: https://www.yourworldoftext.com/wos

Comments

  • edited June 2008
    I use http://www.statcounter.com/

    They give you a configurable visitor counter to put on your pages. Plus you can view all sorts of visitor stats on their site.
  • edited June 2008
    I run my own little web counter, but it is simple, as it only counts visits, not visitors (too difficult in reality without using a cookie, which can be deleted). IP addresses are not constant, so how do you ensure that it is accurate? Plus, psychology comes into play - do people really want to explore a site which has had only 10 visitors?

    Visitor statistics will always be provided externally - Google analytics is good and free - easy to add to the website (I used a simple search&replace tool to do this on the html pages). Your hosting provider should also provide some details, but I am afraid, you would need to write your own tool to extract the data from the log files on your own website to have an interactive report on your site.
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  • edited June 2008
    It's annoying I registered with Google Analytics as it looked just what I needed. However, because I have a sub domain of my universities web server I cannot use the service.

    They only let accounts with URLs such as: www.mywebpage.com or mysite.co.uk but not www.ourserver.ac.uk/pages/AndrewsSite/


    Will stat counter allow this?
    Calling all ASCII Art Architects Visit the WOS Wall of Text and contribute: https://www.yourworldoftext.com/wos
  • edited June 2008
    Scottie_uk wrote: »
    It's annoying I registered with Google Analytics as it looked just what I needed. However, because I have a sub domain of my universities web server I cannot use the service.

    They only let accounts with URLs such as: www.mywebpage.com or mysite.co.uk but not www.ourserver.ac.uk/pages/AndrewsSite/


    Will stat counter allow this?

    Yes

    <message bloody filler>
  • edited June 2008
    Daren wrote: »
    Yes

    <message bloody filler>

    Brilliant thanks mate!! :D
    Calling all ASCII Art Architects Visit the WOS Wall of Text and contribute: https://www.yourworldoftext.com/wos
  • edited June 2008
    Scottie_uk wrote: »
    Daren wrote: »
    Yes

    <message bloody filler>
    Brilliant thanks mate!! :D

    Mweh ... I thought his filler was mediocre at best.

    Ninja stealth filler in progress~
  • edited June 2008
    I use webalizer, but that requires access to run executables on the server

    also google analytics is fairly crap imo
  • edited June 2008
    guesser wrote: »
    also google analytics is fairly crap imo

    What's bad about it? (aside from it being [evil]Google[/evil])
    I've heard only good things about it, ease of use, thorough stats, etc (though I've never used them myself).
  • edited June 2008
    I think Google Analytics are pretty good. Easy to set up, and some thorough reports with easy to use interfaces.
  • edited June 2008
    I just found that it didn't really provide me with any useful information.

    then again, I have access to my server logs, so I'm spoilt for having all the information I want
  • edited June 2008
    This is one of the reports I like in Google Analytics, viewing where your visitors are from. You can zoom in on a map of the world and it shows you down to city level where they are.

    analytcis2cd4.jpg
  • edited June 2008
    Daren wrote: »
    This is one of the reports I like in Google Analytics, viewing where your visitors are from. You can zoom in on a map of the world and it shows you down to city level where they are.

    analytcis2cd4.jpg

    ooh, pretty, they've improved it since I tried it then.

    edit: that doesn't show where your visitors are from ;)
    it shows where the subnet you are on of your ISP is based :p
    like all those helpful "meet women in your area" ads that list women in london, or maidenhead cause that's where your IP resolves to :)
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