Printable View
I was browsing some webpages the other day and I noticed that google-analytics.com flashed across the bottom of my browser as the page was loading.
I found out that it is a small script that you can add into your website to track where users came from, where they are going, browser info, geo-location....etc.
http://www.google.com/analytics
I had to try this out for myself. It will give you an enourmous amount of data.
Well, it’s a nice idea to get information abt hits, but personally I don’t trust any third party sites to track hits of my site, better to download log file from server and can get graphical report using 123analyzer.
I also wouldn't trust any third party. Why not just analyze your own logs and extract that info? Check out the Referer http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/HTRQ_Headers.html#z14
I've had that site blocked in noscript for a long time now. I see a lot sites that use it. So, does that mean that every site I visit that uses that as tracking now has skewed stats? It would be interesting to compare a third party tracking vs local tracking. The third party solution also relies on the client being able to get to the tracking server and exectuing the script. It could easily suffer dns resolution problems, routing problems, content filtering (proxy), firewall, script blocking, etc.
If it is hosted locally, the data is already there and it just has to be extracted from the logs.
I've been using AWStats for this on my intranets. I don't have any public webpages...
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/