How do you track your website visitors?

Question

This is a general questions that might end up in a plugin.

More and more concerns can be found in the Internet regarding privacy, tracking, spying etc. Some guys do not recommend to use Google Analytics anymore. I am a fan of privacy, there was a great talk on TED, the speechman said that privacy of data is the foundation of democracy... anyways :)

I just wanted to know IF anybody of you has replaced google analytics already.

Maybe somebody has written a q2a plugin to trace daily vistors?

Question is also, how much data do we really need? ... For me: Number of visitors daily + Most viewed pages + Search Terms.

I know there are many open source packages outside for tracking, but I don't like to install something else. Keeps my server clean. Maybe you know a tool that can present my server statistics in a better way (currently i have only webalizer available, and it gives me a 1990s feeling plus I feel very limited)?

Open for ideas!

Greetings, Kai
 

Answer 1

I have a slightly different approach.... 

If there weren't any performance issues, I would use in every page more than 1 tracking scripts in parallel to compare they result and to be able to have the most accurate information as possibile about the visitors of my website.

I have already used together (not on a q2a website) google analytics + StatCounter (a service that i like very much and I prefer to google analytics - less features but more simple and immediate to use - but you have to pay in case you have a lot of hits or you want to mantain you historical data).

A server-side only approach (Apache logs analysis) that I have tried is AWStats, but I did not go on with it since it required too many work to setup and mantain (not easy to configure, batch to schedule in production, so not real time results).

But of course everything depends from your own requirements...

About the data that I analyze I give also a lot of importance to the browsers/system statistics, so to have an idea about which type of testing to do, to the visitor path / traffic sources, to have an idea of the goodness of my "marketing" efforts, and of course to the keywords used, to know if my seo efforts are on the right way or not 

Speaking about q2a, I've just installed and tested this plugin

https://github.com/kufeiko/QA-Google-Analytics-Plugin

that seems to work, but is specific for google analytics and not general.

Comments

Thanks again for your feedback, maxjtechno. Indeed, an interesting approach. I actually thought of using no script anymore =) ... even if I will be a bit blind regarding my business and conversions. But why not to be different ;)

Here on this q2a forum there is no Google Analytics either. I am curious how gidgreen is tracking statistics.

Answer 2

I am okay with Google Analytics. Since it is giving so much details, especially what I required. Even it can provide click data as well as can define goal etc... Its been fantastic tool for me. I have done highly dynamic advertise menagment website just based on Google Analytics. It has great features and API which provides almost all type of tracking we usually need.

However I many time refer server logs as well. My server (I believe most of the server) provides detailed analytics including country, ip address, time, browser, device, search term, referal, time spend, page visit etc...

My logic is implementing analytics directly into the Q2A script can slow down the site as well as increase the database. However it is depend on the number of users.

In terms of privacy, I believe nothing is private in the web world. Now days somehow you are open to everyone, just matter of we aware of it or not. However the third party analytics such as google does job nicely and I belive it keeps data private.

Comments

Hi Jatin, thanks for your feedback.
"I believe it keeps data private."
→ http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_how_the_nsa_betrayed_the_world_s_trust_time_to_act.html
→ http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_kovacs_tracking_the_trackers.html

I consider now: 1. Using no tool at all and just read my server logs via webalizer or 2. use Piwik open-source tool.

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Just a quote that I found researching on tracking: "Google, Twitter and Facebook are doing more spying on internet user than people realize. I recommend removing all Google code, Facebook “Like” and “Follow” Twitter buttons off your websites. Because we as publishers are giving our information but also our visitors information to these big data mining corporations basically for free. They make billions we get some crumbs and now only some keyword crumbs."
http://forum.piwik.org/read.php?2,85713