Looking for a good web traffic statistics program

exiztone

Hey, I've gone through the first few pages of hotscripts.com but everything they have sucks.
I'm looking for a good website traffic script in php.
Something that will log each session, make sure only unique hits count, take into count that there is usually more than one page to a site =/ i.e. the one I'm testing now logs every click on a page as a new hit (i.e. you're on index.php and you goto pictures.php that's 2 hits) which isn't right.
Logging into a mysql datbase is fine aswell. I don't mind.
But the generated reports should be good & clean. Anyone know of such a script?

nahdoic

Personally, I've done an awful lot of research into this matter, and from my own experience I found it very difficult to find what you are looking for, which is basically real time tracking you can run on your own web server. A good one is very, very difficult to find.

There are plenty of good free raw log file analysers out there, look no further than.

http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=245

A lot of people swear by awstats, and they’re listed first there. The great thing about raw log file analysers is that they can track spiders indexing your website.

I don’t know of any good real time tracker product that will let you install it on your own web server. Most people who have gone looking for one, end up not finding one that is good enough. They then usually do one of three things:

- make do with one of the log analysers
- write or adapt their own piece of code to track what they want
- use one of the many, many outsourced real time tracking services out there.

If you find a good real time tracker please let me know, because I'd love to take a look at their code. I think this could be the reason why a good one may not exist. People just protecting their interests, if they can run a service from their own web server, why risk giving out their code.

Can I give myself a shameless self promotion here? Feel free to snip the next paragraph out mod.

I myself run www.StatCounter.com, and it’s hosted with www.host365.ie, so it’s an entirely Irish tracking service based in Ireland. It’s free to join. Naturally if someone visits your site, they won't be counted as a unique visitor again no matter what page they visit after that. We’ve also just added an IP database of countries to the rest of the stats. So we can tell you exactly what countries your members are coming from now.

exiztone

Thanks, it looks good.
The only problem is... I do have access to my log files. But I don't think they're formated in the way that is required for that app.

nahdoic

If your web server is running apache, you can, or you can ask your admin to edit the LogFormat directive in the apache.conf file.

This controls the format in which your web log files are recorded.

exiztone

I've botherd them enough this week :P
Might wait for another day before I try that

mneylon

Standard Apache logs are compatible with AWStats. If you need to change the format slightly it won't take much work for your host to do it.

nahdoic

yeah but it sounds like his host has changed the format already - perhaps using a more condensed format as those logs sure can take up a huge amount of space.

so he'll probably be asking them to change it back really, they mightn't like that ... of course you can just move host if they don't

misterq

You can configure Awstats to read log files as you have specified in the .conf file, which should be useful even if the host has modified the log file format.

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/