Looking at access stats

Posted on September 1, 2005 by Dave J.

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.

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  • Anonymous

    hi dave,can u say what tool you are currently using for your web access reports? and what’s the new tool that u plan 2 use?am into marketing too & i wud like 2 know a lil’ more abo’ using the webaccess logs goldmine more effectively. fyi, our guys use a javascript too (think thats what you mean by client side tracking)

  • Anonymous

    hi dave,can u say what tool you are currently using for your web access reports? and what’s the new tool that u plan 2 use?am into marketing too & i wud like 2 know a lil’ more abo’ using the webaccess logs goldmine more effectively. fyi, our guys use a javascript too (think thats what you mean by client side tracking)

  • Dave J.

    I am currently using < HREF="http://www.order1.net/links/affiliate.cgi?ckey=mach5&akey=b2blog&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmach5.com%2Fproducts%2Fanalyzer%2F" REL="nofollow">FastStats<> to analyize the access, then save page hits to an excel spreadsheet to get a month-to-month comparison. You make an interesting point that watching the logs <>and<> the client-side activity makes more sense.As to javascript/client-side tool, I will be shopping for one. Any recommendations?

  • Dave J.

    the client-side activity makes more sense.As to javascript/client-side tool, I will be shopping for one. Any recommendations?

  • Anonymous

    thanx dave.we use the following combo :awstats for analyzing logs & a customized < HREF="http://www.phpopentracker.de/en/index.php" REL="nofollow">phpOpenTracker <> for the client side scripting. the thing is results vary (of course coz of diff metrics like how each views session times etc)

  • Anonymous

    for the client side scripting. the thing is results vary (of course coz of diff metrics like how each views session times etc)