I've subscribed to StatCounter which is a service for gathering statistics for web traffic. It's a hit counter with very nice tracking facilities. You don't have to have a hit counter displayed on your page: I've hidden mine, it's for me to know how fewmany visitors I have had. It shows things like:
- Where in the world visitors are connecting from (hey there, how are things in China?), their ISP's etc.
- Which pages they have looked at (how they a going around the site)
- How long they spend looking at each page
- Easily set it up to ignore my own accesses
It does the kind of things that awstats, webstats, Drupal statistics etc cannot do without reverse DNS lookups etc.
It relies on the visitor's browser downloading a little bitmap and running some javascript. I think this is good as it means it will not record the 300 odd bots (including damn referrer spam) that suck my bandwidth every month, I can tell which visitors are humans. If I want to look at bot activity I can analyse the raw logs. Awstats and Drupal ststistics are still there for me.
Best of all, it's free if you have less than 1000 visitors a day.
Peter's Moblog
I see now why it's free. It only logs the last 100 visitors, which for me is around a day. It costs $9 a month to log 1000 visitors, not worth it for me, but it's just so cool seeing the list of countrys people are visiting from.
Peter