Google Analytics

[Ben Chase]

Has anyone used this product to analyze visits to their website? I think it's probably one of the most useful marketing tools I've seen in awhile....You can actually see where a lot of your customer traffic comes from. One of the potential problems I see is just that some users are coming from a proxy server which typically is sourced from a single IP.

Ben C

[robc]

all web statistics are inaccurate. For example, revisits by people who still have your pages in their browser cache, are not registered. The stats are useful as an indication of what people are searching on to find your pages and where they are doing those searches. Most will be from google itself. They should also give accurate figures of uniquie IP numbers visiting your site. They may even give country info.
Mostly they won't tell you who was visiting your site because as you say, the visits come via a proxy and the IP number points to the ISP and not the user.

What I don't like about google analytics is that it is making google even more powerful than it already is. The reason is because they now have statistics about who is visiting your site and which other search engines are being used to access your site.

Google analytics was Urchin stats which google bought not long ago. Urchin was regarded one of, if not the best commercially available stats program.

AWSTATS, which is free, is used by a lot of ISP's. Any good ISP will allow you to install AWSTATS on your web server providing they have PEARL installed. Its perhaps not as good as googles analytics but its free and doesn't provide google with free and valuable marketing information about who is doing what where and when.

Most good ISP's or hosting companies will provide a pre installed stats package with your web space anyway.

[Ben Chase]

It's funny how people end up visiting photographs that I liked, but weren't my favorites, that's one thing I'm getting out of the stats that I've seen.

Google analytics is free if you have an adwords account - which so far appears to have at least been moderately effective for me.

[Frank Petronio]

The regular stats tell you more than you need to know already, including page views, entry and exit points, keywords used, etc. Unless I was getting lots of hits on an image, I wouldn't rely on my webstats to "vote" for images. But when I do notice a spike in the hits on an image it usually means one thing: Some stupid SOB linked their webpage to it and is hijacking my bandwidth.

That extra bandwidth usually isn't much but I ask them to stop based on the principal of the matter, it's a bad practice. And if the person is a jerk, you can simple rename your original image, change the html on your page, and substitute something very inappropriate with the same name as your hijacked image ;)

[Eric James]

You crack me up Frank!

[robc]

hey frank just to keep your blood pressure down, you can place the following lines into a file called .htaccess (with no suffix) and place it in your images folder. Then create a folder called sob in your root folder and make an image called sob.jpg and place it in the sob folder. That should take care of hotlinking for you. It will only work if you are hosted on an Apache web server. And only works if your host allows it to work.




Options +SymlinksIfOwnerMatch
Rewriteengine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://frankpetronio\.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www\.frankpetronio\.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG)$ http://www\.frankpetronio\.com/sob/sob.jpg [R,L]

[Joe Lipka]

One time I found out that someone was hotlinking to one of my images. So, I went to the web site to find out what type of site would hijack one of my images.

It was a bulletin board of course, and what really hurt my feelings was that there were no posts at all.

[robc]

If you want to see how bad hotlinking can get have a look at this site. I got hit by them but they don't get many hits. replace space dot space with .

skunk dot spray dot se/visaskunk.jsp?id=2638156

all the images are hotlinked...

[QT Luong]

I haven't deployed Analytics yet, but I read that it can sometimes slow down your site significantly. Some of the folks who use ad blockers also block Analytics.

[robc]

Why not just install AWSTATS to your own server if you haven't already got it.
It provides reasonably good stats which are much better than the likes of webalizer.

And because you feed AWSTATS your daily apache log file under a cron job, it requires nothing in your html. i.e. there is zero overhead on your web page performance. Unless that is, you require screen size and one or two other non essential bits of client information, in which case there is a piece of javascript you can place in your html to provide that information.

I guess it really depends how much analysis you want to do and to what level but then if you want that detail, you can write your own code to extract what you want from the raw log files.

[Ben Chase]

That extra bandwidth usually isn't much but I ask them to stop based on the principal of the matter, it's a bad practice. And if the person is a jerk, you can simple rename your original image, change the html on your page, and substitute something very inappropriate with the same name as your hijacked image

I've seen some very amusing examples of this happening - the best probably was a nice .gif of a large middle finger :)

That would probably catch someone's attention!

[Shoot The Moon]

Hotlinking is a massive problem unfortunately. We used to have a lot of sample images of our food photography on our site, but there was so much hotlinking to them that we had to completely remove them. We couldn't even afford the bandwidth for replacement images. :(

[erie patsellis]

I second the(third, fourth?) the reccomendation for AWSTATS. if you have the bandwidth, or your site isn't terribly traffic intensive, you can set up a PC with SME server, which is probably about the easiest server system to manage, and you get a a full firewall/router/mail server to boot.


erie