[WEB4LIB] Reporting web statistics

[John Little]

Analog, an excellent (and free) log analysis tool, is reportedly used by 25%
of the webmasters out there.  I would highly recommend this product.  It is
very flexible, runs on most platforms, and can create reports in HTML,
ASCII, or CSV (for further spreadsheet tweaking if that is actually
necessary).  Analog's documentation has the following information about they
types of statistics that can and cannot be calculated.

>From one of the Analog documentation
pages ------------------<http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/analog/docs/we
bworks.html>:
... what happens when somebody connects to your web site, and what
statistics you can and can't calculate. There is a lot of confusion about
this. It's not helped by statistics programs which claim to calculate things
which cannot really be calculated, only estimated, with varying degrees of
accuracy. The simple fact is that certain data which we would like to know
and which we expect to know are simply not available.

... I can recommend four excellent articles about this subject: Interpreting
WWW Statistics by Doug Linder
<http://gopher.nara.gov:70/0h/what/stats/webanal.html>; Making Sense of Web
Usage Statistics by Dana Noonan<http://www.piperinfo.com/pl01/usage.html>;
Getting Real about Usage Statistics by Tim Stehle
<http://www.wprc.com/wpl/stats.html>; and, the most negative of all, Why Web
Usage Statistics are (Worse Than) Meaningless by Jeff Goldberg
<http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/stats/>.
--------------------------- END|

I hope that addresses part of your question.  Other answers are interspersed
below...

----- Original Message -----

> Hi!  I am curious as to how you report your statistics gathered from
> your web site?

I use analog to generate reports about various sections of our web site. As
part of the reporting process the monthly reports are sent to the primary
document masters of those sections.

> Are you reporting hits on specific pages or overall hits
> to the site?

both

> How are you reporting in-house vs. remote hits?

At the moment I'm report hits per page and have not created in-house vs.
remote comparisons.

> Do you
> report trails within your site or referring sites?

I don't believe trails within a site can be done reliably (it's not a
feature of Analog so I'm not doing it).  At least one thread I read
suggested that trail reporting is so inaccurate it should not be done.  I'll
leave it up to others to debate the merits of trails.   I do report the
referrer section of my logs.


Hope that helps.
--
John.Litle at Duke.edu
Web Development Librarian