Comments on: Poll results – Where do Your Readers Come From

By: PreZ

PreZ — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 10:09:02 +0000

Most of my readers come from search engines and the rest I would say come from my other websites and friends.

By: Sergi

Sergi — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 07:29:08 +0000

I think there is one missing answer: they come from nowhere or people-who-type-the-url-directly ;-)

By: Neil Patel

Neil Patel — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 01:12:12 +0000

The main problem I see with web analytics solutions is that they not 100 percent accurate and are not setup to track everything which would affect the accuracy of the poll results. I use Statcounter, Urchin, WebTrends and other analytics solutions for my clients and have seen significant variations in numbers.

By: Bonnie

Bonnie — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 23:42:29 +0000

Sitemeter, Statcounter and Awstats… everything I need, I think!

By: vivek

vivek — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 22:20:17 +0000

Beth, I think you can try out weblogexpert http://www.weblogexpert.com/. I’m using this one for my site, here is public stats http://cyberciti.biz/nixcraft/stats/ (limited stats only) you can try out 30 days trial (full version). It is the one of the best I ever used :)

By: Beth

Beth — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 20:55:11 +0000

Does anyone know of anything (similar to AWstats) that is *easy* to install, but uses my log files and not javascript?

By: eMarketing Mark

eMarketing Mark — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 19:33:57 +0000

I have also become a fan of StatCounter and have watched it grow in terms of the information that it offers – good selection and the keyword elements are particularly good.

They have been promising for a while to bring out an Advanced version and reduce charges at the same time, since although the basic package is free, it only stores information on the last 100 page hits that you can do the analysis with although it keeps number of visitors and number of page hits from the set up of the account onwards.

Well worth a look.

Mark

By: Hendry Lee

Hendry Lee — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 17:45:44 +0000

yunasville,

I’ve been on some hosting companies where they don’t allow refreshing/updating AWstats every so hours, let alone minutes. The link is disabled because the fact that it can hog resources.

Back then when I was in the ISP industry, the server can take up to 20 seconds just to process the log file (about 100,000 lines per second if memory serve me well).

CPU and computer technology in general improved but still many hosting don’t recommend the practice. I’ve heard customers getting an email telling them to stop refreshing AWstats.

Being able to use other stats package has its own advantage because if you compare different stats package will usually give you different results.

By: yunasville

yunasville — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 17:35:42 +0000

Hmm.. I am not sure why other peopole can’t run reports during the day wtih AWstats. I click “update” every 13 mins to see what’s going on.. It’s a live update software that let’s you see in real time what people on doing on the site..

By: Hendry

Hendry — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 16:38:48 +0000

Thanks for posting the result, very useful indeed.

Someone mentioned this before but I’ll do it again with a few comments:
http://pphlogger.phpee.com/

I setup Power Phlogger on of of my domain. Like many stat packages, I need to generate a simple JavaScript code to paste on my blog. I usually paste it on the footer.php file on my WP templates.

It may be quite old but still works quite well. It allows me to see what keywords SE refer to me (including the exact SE).

What I like most is that it provides thorough information, one access per line of the visitors, including visitors’ path. For example, I know that after adding RSS syndications of my other blogs on the same domain at the bottom of the page, my pageviews increase.

You may need basic PHP installation skills to get it up and running but once you’ve done that you can use it on as many domain as you have. Neat.

With PPhlogger and AWStats package from CPanel, I can get insights from my log without having to download any log files.

By: Arun

Arun — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 16:20:33 +0000

You forgot to mention about mybloglog. I signed up for the service after I read about it here and it has been a useful tool. The most important use of it has been in re-arranging ad location and also re-arranging the links on the page.

By: Vernon

Vernon — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 15:06:00 +0000

Hey Darren -

I did use the ShortStat plug-in for WordPress but noticed that after a few weeks it really started to lag to the point where my pages wouldn’t finish loading forever. After I removed it, “zip!” right back to fast loading.

I’m taking a look at some of the various packages your visitors commented about and will post back if there’s anything relevant to say that hasn’t already been said! :)

Best,
Vernon

By: Netwalker

Netwalker — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 14:19:00 +0000

I use Stattraq, I liked because it integrates with WordPress. And also I use PHP-Stats, because I gives me more information about visitors, search engines, queries, etc.

In my hosting plan, I have Awstats, but I don’t use it a lot, because it registers everything, including referer spam (a problem I had with my photoblog). So it’s not an accurate reading of my visitors.

It varies where the visitors come, one my blogs has only 14.7% of visitors coming from search engines, and the others are about 45% coming from search engines.

By: vivek

vivek — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 14:08:42 +0000

I’m using StatTraq plugin of Word press. It collects following information
* Summary
* Hit Counter
* User Counter
* Page Views
* Browser
* Referrer
* Search Terms
* SE Saturation
* IP addresses
It displays graphs too. Get it here : http://www.randypeterman.com/StatTraq/index.php

By: Basim

Basim — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 12:38:50 +0000

Currently, most of my visitors come via Google. I find it interesting to watch which keywords lead to which article and how often single articles are viewed on average. I use a stat application called StatiX (which I wrote myself).

By: Dan Wolfgang

Dan Wolfgang — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 12:26:38 +0000

I'm using Mint mostly--it's New Unique Referrers pane is a great way to find new incoming visitors.

By: Tim Flight

Tim Flight — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 12:25:40 +0000

I’m using AWStats primarily. However not being able to run reports for a single day is a huge problem. So, I did use the shortstat WP plugin which gave me the additional reporting I needed, but I’ve had numerous performance problems with it and dumped it. I’m looking to purchase Urchin 6 software (not urchin 6 on demand) when it comes available.

By: Dehumanizer

Dehumanizer — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 10:52:35 +0000

I use AWStats, but then again, I have my own server, at home, so I can update it every half hour, instead of many installations which only update it daily.

As for me, most of my visitors come from blog exchangers… I think I’m still in the Google sandbox, because not only I get little traffic from google, but what little I get, the search phrases aren’t really the keywords I use, or the theme of my blogs themselves…

By: Nick Vanderhoven

Nick Vanderhoven — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 09:08:43 +0000

I use my personalised verion of Webalizer. However i’m looking for a nicer way to face my RSS-stats, what aggregators and so. Maybe feedburner, have some good impression on that with my blog. Problem is i should have known faster, now i will have to redirect my rss.xml file, and that won’t be very nice for my search engine optimization :(

By: Andy Merrett

Andy Merrett — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 08:52:47 +0000

For quick updates throughout the day, I use the free version of SiteMeter. It’s good for tracking human visitors because it doesn’t count bots etc. And it’s good enough to see where people are coming from, to get an idea of trends etc.

Two of my blogs use Webalizer which I’m quite happy with. My other blogs don’t have dedicated server stats built in yet – I need to get that sorted out really.

The most useful stats for me are the monthly/yearly total vistors/page view stats and the referral listings. As I only have the free version of SiteMeter, I keep my own record of popular search terms – I also click back to the search engine to see what position I come up in for those terms. It’s actually quite encouraging that often I’m on the first page of 10 results, but it’s also encouraging that people do seem to click through on search results several pages down (like the 40-50th position).