Measuring traffic to your blog WITHOUT having access to your web server logs
Posted : July 13, 2004 at 10:54 am [America/Los_Angeles]
Measuring traffic to your web site/blog using softwares like AWStats is not that difficult.
However, if you don’t consider yourself geeky enough to go through all that trouble or if you just don’t have access to your web server logs, this free service might be just what you have been looking for. All it really involves is adding a one liner Javascript
to the pages you want to capture metrics on. Of course, if you use a common header/footer for your entire site, enabling this service to measure traffic to your entire site is trivial.
I’ve been using this service (just for kicks) for a few days now and it has worked pretty well. It’s not as comprehensive as AWStats, but it sure does get the job done and also has one metric which I don’t think AWStats has - Resolutions. Basically, it displays information regarding the resolution settings of your visitors monitor.
Note:
A few drawbacks of this approach:
- This service will not capture hits to your XML feeds. As most bloggers know, that’s a very big chunk of your traffic
- There is a performance hit every time someone visits your site.
- Anand
Category: Services and Software
6 Comments
Hey there Anand. I’m with a site called FeedBurner.com, and we provide a free service to help you get a handle on your feed traffic. There are a number of other services we offer as well.
Just wanted to let you know. Also, I’m anxiously awaiting Part 3 of the Eclipse webapp walkthrough, having recently dumped JBuilder in favor of Eclipse. Keep up the good work!
Eric Lunt
http://www.buringdoor.com/eric
Posted by: Eric at July 13, 2004 @ 12:58 pm
Actually, awstats can do it w/ some additional JS that’s included with the distribution.
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/awstats_config.html#MiscTrackerUrl
Posted by: Anonymous at July 13, 2004 @ 1:38 pm
Thanks Eric!
Yup, I have visited FeedBurner.com a few times but for some reason always stopped short of signing up for it. I don’t know why. I will definitely check it out and, if it really appeals to my IT senses, try even blogging about it
As for the Eclipse series, I promise to write about it soon. Unfortunately, I tend to get excited about very simple stuff and then all my plans go right out of the window..;-)
Thanks for providing the proverbial kick-in-my-b***
- Anand
Posted by: Anand Sharma at July 13, 2004 @ 3:51 pm
My Anonymous friend:
Must say I was not aware of it. Is it a service though? I mean if a user can install AWStats on a server, he/she might as well use the core product (which is an off-line and much more thorough approach anyways) for their traffic measurement needs
The cool thing about Reinvigorate (das.reinvigorate.net) is that it’s a free service that you can sign up for and do very little to start capturing metrics. Meant mainly for non-techy folks.
Thanks for the info though. It was definitely news to me.
- Anand
Posted by: Anand Sharma at July 13, 2004 @ 3:57 pm
The other problem with this approach is that you never see errors like 404’s
Posted by: angus at July 15, 2004 @ 7:29 pm
Yup. Good point.
- Anand
Posted by: Anand Sharma at July 16, 2004 @ 12:16 am