Understanding your Web Statistics

The 2 cents I wanted to put in has to do with the differences in comparing server side stat's (awstats, webalizer, and analog) vs. script stat's (google analytics). Web server software like IIS and Apache keep a log of the ip addresses that request information (html files, php files, image files .. whatever) and store that information into log files. Server side stat's read those log files and crunches it into graphs and information that is more easily understood by us humans. The differences in server packages differ because whoever set the standard for crunching in separate was explained above in that someone arbitrarily said this is relevant this way and not.

On the other hand is script type statistics, like Google analytics, which puts a special javascript snippit on the pages of your site, if a page doesn’t get that script then it can not gather any data. But there is a large advantage of using script based stat's in that script languages like javascript are only run inside a browser. Spiders and Search engines that pull your site do not execute javascript and therefore do not count when it comes to a "visit" or a "hit", this means the data in Google Analytics would be more relevant because you know that real eyeballs had to hit that page because it had to be a real browser that has javascript turned on that opened the page and executed the script that got counted as a "hit" or "visit". Server side stats show all the requests including search engine spiders and the like.

While packages like AWStats try to differentiate real people from non-people, the issue is that server side stats somehow have to keep a list of what ip addresses spiders come from, or what browser agent information is a spider and not some new browser like Google’s new Crome browser. If a new spider was made and the server side stats didn’t know that it was a new spider, how would it classify the visits from that visit?

Where as a script stats package would not see a spider hit since spiders hardly ever execute javascript while browsers would, thus getting a more accurate count of real eyeballs looking at the page.

Hope that helps some people understand the differences.