Detailed Site Stats?

[Dario D.]

Hi all.
Currently, my website has CPanel (and thus Webalyzer and Analog) for tracking my site's stats, but these are VERY limited, and don't say all that much.

Is there some solution to getting more detailed site stats? For example, when I post a new file, I want to see how many people are downloading it, who, what region they're from, etc. Webalyzer will only tell you about your TOP couple files, not ALL of them.

Is there something that has much more detailed site stats in general?

Thanks. (btw, my host is Lunarpages)

 

[Albino]

google analytics is good, as is awstats

 

[NeeJam]

google analytics

 

[Steven_D]

Make your own with a database backend. For marketing purposes and identifying sections of your site that need work etc record everything.

For each new user put a Unique ID on their PC, then for every page visited record
Time / Date
IP of user
Referring Page
Current Page
Query String eg ?ID=5
The Unique number of the user

Then on every page, have a little checker that checks their cookie for a unique ID, and if they dont have one, record into a seperate table, the refering site, the IP, time date etc and the ID from the hits table you made.

Then, if you really want to go all out, if you have outbound links aswell, send them to a tracking page first, where you record the link, the unique id, and type of add, text, image, flash, banner Vertical etc.

Then after a few months what you end up with is something like this,

You can see where a user came from, how much they spend on your site, how much time they spend on your site, and how many links they click.

Which means you can see, that you might get 10 people from a search engine and only 5 from a featured listing you have, but no one from the search engine buys from you, and 3 out of the 5 from the featured listing bought from you, they each spent around $25 on their first visit and re-buy from you every 90 days.

And even better these people click your outbound links, so you can tell people who advertise on your site how many people clicked their link, and how often they spend money on your site, and how much, so you have an idea what they are worth as clients.

Dont be afraid to treat your website as you would a business, and you wouldn't run a businesses without knowing where your clients are coming from, where your quality clients come from and where your non quality clients come from.

+ I drew up something a little bit more detailed that this for my site, and it took me less than 12 hours to have it working, then I just copy & past 12 lines of code on each page of my site, and just change the variable, Page_Name and I have some amazing stats.

I can tell you which search bots have been on my site, which pages they crawl the most, how long they stay on a page, where they have errors, which pages I need to adjust my meta tags.

And I know that for every 1 person I get visiting my site from a featured listing, I get 3 from my forum signatures, and I know that of those 3 only 1 in 10 will buy and I havnt made a sale from a featured listing.

Plus I know, what pages people who buy from me visit, and how long they spend, eg how much they read, and that will help with my re-design I am doing.

+ you can break it down into countries by using IP-Geo locater, and you can make really nice little graphs, and if you have the time, you can make reports that run at the end of each day and the results are emailed to you, so you can see your daily stats, without having to do anything but check your email.

Take the time to build your own, the benefits are endless.

 

[Michael]

There's really no point to reinvent the wheel. Not that the typical programmer could duplicate it, but www.google.com/analytics is the best I've seen and the easiest to set up.

 

[Steven_D]

idevlabs, i check the analytics, its nice and pretty but there wasnt much info on the site. IT keeps talking about checking ROI and transactions but I think it is refering to people coming to your site via CPC advertising.

Can you please confirm for me, does the google analytics record how much each person spends on your site in your custom checkout process, and how often they spend?

If so then yes, i retract my post lol, and Ill prob give it a go.

 

[Michael]

It shows the amount of time spent on every single page for each visitor, it shows the bounce rate, a map overlay of where all your visitors came from in the world, what browser they were using, what OS, what screen resolution, what internet speed, if they came from a search engine what engine it was and what term they searched for, what sites have referred users to yours, and so much more I can't even get into it all.

The conversion goals are amazing as well. It lets you set funnels (expected paths for users to reach a certail goal, like buying something or registering or what have you) and see where people are dropping off in those funnels so you can fix what is needed in terms of design and calls to action.

It also lets you track how many people are coming to your site from Asense, what keyword they came from, etc. That way you can fine tune your Adwords account and get the best bang for your buck.

I'm not trying to knock what you did, which is an impressive accomplishment. I'm just saying there is no way anyone that doesn't have a team of brilliant developers at their disposal and wads of cash could ever reproduce/replace what Google has done with their Analytics suite.

 

[Dario D.]

Okay, thanks very much for the help all (and to Steven_D in particular). Quick question: Do any of these solutions allow you to see how many people are viewing/downloading your newest posted files, for instance? My site is not business oriented [it's this one here], so my biggest concern is being able to track my latest posted files/pages, etc, and see who's downloading them, and where they're from.

For example, I might post a 500mb trailer movie for one of my projects that I'm submitting to a publisher, and I might want to see if they've viewed it yet (and how many times). Unfortunately, I'm not a programmer, so my ability to setup my own database or highly-dynamic website is very limited.

I CAN, however, paste snippets of code and do minor tasks, such as I did with setting up Statcounter (which wasn't much help for my particular needs). It seemed to do more or less what Webalyzer does, unless I just didn't dig deep enough.

 

[Steven_D]

Dario, what language are you programming in and what sort of server set up / hosting arrangement do you have.

I may be able to code it for you, thats how strongly I believe that you need have have something custom.

I will definitely recommend the Google analytics, they have some really helpful information but heres where it all goes wrong.

Goolge was recently estimated to be worth around 25 Billion dollars, now they didnt get there by helping people with their site over helping sell their adwords so heres what im thinking. The analytics tells you which of your add words is working the best, but it doesnt tell you how many of those people bought from you, for all you know, its some company in india with 1000 employees whos spend all day clicking add words, not legit customers who want to buy.

Think of it this way, do you think google is more interested in showing you detailed statistics of your business to help make you more money, or, to show you statistics that will help sell more of their add words.

No offence to google, they are great, my fav search engine.

Also, the analytics dont (as far as I could tell) show you how much each customer has spend with you, surly you want to know how much each person spends so that you can reward the high spenders, also, if you find that the people from a certain place spend $500 a year each and the people from another add only spend $50 a year, but both adds cost you $150 a year, surly you want to know this so that you can cancel the add that is costing you money each yeah.

in regards specifically to posting a specific movie and checking if people are watching it or not, the analytics should show you how many people have visited that page, and how much time they spent there, eg, did they watch the whole thing.

Someone else will have to confirm if it shows you where people come from, maby they can post a screenie, which would be good because I have to wait 24 hours before my analytics will kick in.

This is a tine exert from my database
ID number of entry, Date, Time, IP, Stored Username (If ever loged in before), Unique No, Page visited, referrer address, query string if any
(2345,'20070901','12:33:24 AM','202.79.62.11','',0,'default.asp','http ://www.mydirectorylink .com/admin /manage-links.php',''),
(2361,'20070901','2:33:33 AM','71.220.182.176','',0,'default.asp','http:// www .small-business-forum.com/ showthread.php?t=17197',''),
(2371,'20070901','3:29:23 AM','24.166.149.68','',0,'default.asp','http: //i.ezine articles.com/article-management/ezinearticles/qc_m anager.php',''),

There is another DB which stores the new unique ID, and site hite, these people have no unique ID as it is their first visit, and this is the first page they looked at.

So someone post if google does this please, but I have in the back end of my site (Secret squirel hidden directory) is a reverse lookup, so I can browse the hits for the day, and if I see something interesting, I can bring up all the pages that they browsed, and where they originally came from, I can even see a video of what they saw, my system just runs me through their recorded actions.

I can see here that the person is reviewing one of my articles, or came from my forum signature, and even which post they were reading when they followed to my site.

Everytime someone makes a payment it records their unique ID and when I browse a user, eg they send me a help request, or contact me in any way, I can look up and see what this person is worth to my business, so I dont piss of people who spend money with me.

Like I said in my initial post, its worth spending a bit more to help run your site more like a business.

Depending on what language and system you have I may be able to help, all you really need is referer query string and unique ID and page.

But I would try the analytics first, I was signed up in less than 2 minutes (I already had a webmasters acct) and then I slaped the code onto about 5 of my pages, and im just waiting the 24 hours for it to kick in.

I am really interested to see if it picks up the yahoo and msn bots and even its own googlebot.

hope I have been some help, but I feel I have prob just confused you more.

 

[Dario D.]

Thank you for the help, Steven_D.

Dario, what language are you programming in and what sort of server set up / hosting arrangement do you have.

I'm programming in FrontPage 2003 (ie, I don't program, I just setup crap visually) ... My web host is Lunarpages, and I have no idea what their server setup is. All I know is that I have access to CPanel through their site.

I may be able to code it for you, thats how strongly I believe that you need have have something custom.

Thanks a lot for the offer, but I really think my needs are quite simple in this case. I don't have a lot of website-development time (or even the time to carefully examine my site statistics) which is why I was searching for something similar to Webalizer that could give me individual file stats above all. Just something so that I can pop in from time to time and see how such-and-such file or page is doing. But I *really* appreciate the offer. Means a lot.

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S'more details:

I don't generate cash from my site, as it's entirely for the purpose of people viewing at their leisure, and seeing how my art projects are coming along. In the future, I may begin designing and developing software with programmers, at which time I'll need to get serious with site design, but I believe the technical aspects of that would be handled by the programmers.

But that's years down the road at the moment. It's absolutely nothing that I'm looking into for now, as right now I'm just going about this casually. I basically just came here wondering if there was something quick, easy, and fairly visual for a noob like me to install into my site in order to get better file/user stats... preferably in a Webalyzer/Google_Analytics-type way.

I looked at the Google Analytics flash demo, but didnt notice anything in particular that mentioned being able to see stats for any given file on your site... so, I'm still kind of uncertain about it for my particular needs. Some of the files I want to track will not be linked to on any pages; they will just be stored on the site and accessed from direct links that I email to people.