Looking at access stats

Shedding my sales responsibilities has given me a bit more time to take closer looks at marketing data and resources. I feel almost like I'm squandering my time, but I hope what I may find is valuable. This morning I ran my web-access reports for August. Studying them closer, I noticed a referrer from a competitor's site--so I started digging. Here are some tidbits I found looking thru my server logs and reports:

• Above mentioned referrer is junk, caused by a crawler/bot called Zeus.
• There are a number of other bots hitting my site heavily, including noxtrumbot, ichiro, & nutch.
• Hmmm, are these bots inflating my access stats?
• Back-tracking on a Google Syndication referrer brought me to a link/engine-spam farm.
• Firefox hits are now 9.9% of accesses!
  

Overall, I've decided that the access data has been pretty uniform over time to the point where trend-tracking is not valuable. That means that I can change to a different web-access tracking method. Why change? Well, to get those bots out of my access-stats for one. That might give me a better view of actual site traffic. And the client-side tools give a better picture of usage, too. Client-side measurement has been on my to-do list for a while.