Creating my own Web Statistics package
Not that I don’t like Webalizer, Analog, AwStats, or ShortStat, I just think a more custom application would serve me better. I have no desire to know what countries my traffic is coming from, or what languages. I also want the ability to know *who* gets tracked, *why* they are tracked, and *how* they are tracked… and I want complete control over it. I also enjoy the learning experience as a side bonus. In addition to that, I want to be able to add other tracking mechanisms to my Stats package, without the need to do major integration. An example would be the ability to track my google adwords traffic separately from the rest of my traffic (though I would tie each adword hit back to a unique session, in case I wanted to compare browsing patterns of pay-per-click traffic).
This past weekend, I spent a couple hours developing web stat software that tracks unique sessions, and page hits. I have the ability to exclude pages from being tracked, which will neither register that hit as a page hit, or a unique session. At the moment it’s fairly small and simple (which I think is a good thing), though I do plan to add a mechanism that will allow me to exclude whole sessions from being tracked (because I don’t really want to track my own traffic, and sometimes I can really distort my own statistics by viewing my site often… for testing purposes, PR purposes… I don’t just frequent my own websites for the hell of it).
I setup my initial stats software to allow easy integration with other tracking addons, which allowed me to add Google Adwords tracking software to my whole site, with only 1 line of code. Thank God for object-oriented php!
Now, I just need a catchy name for it… like "Ultra Cool Web Stats Program", or "Funky Monkey Traffic Watching Junky".
on July 28th, 2005 at 1:41 am
I like the Funkey Monkey one
Why don’t you want to see where your traffic is coming? And what language? I would think you would want to know, incase you are getting traffic from Germany and want to send them to a geo targeted page. It would make your site more useful if the person can read the content.
What if you are getting a bunch of traffic from china, and your site takes credit cards, why not just send them to a relevant site that can do transactions the way they need.
What if your site sells merchandise that can only be shipped to the USA. Wouldn’t it be helpful to see in stats that you are getting UK traffic and be able to send them somewhere else instead?