web stats - path analysis/clickstream

[sdlangers]

hi,

 

i was wondering if anyone could recommend a good web stats program that gives all the usual information about your site but also can show for each user that visited the site which pages they clicked on and in which order

 

any ideas would be appreciated

 

thanks

[mskeel]

AWStats is a great program -- though only if you are using APACHE as your web server (and who isn't?). If you are looking for .Net solutions, I don't really know of any. Also, I don't think AWStats will give you the information you are looking for (entered at page A, then went to B->C->D->E->F, then exited the site). The problem is that that kind of informaiton is not logged directly. The statistics you derive all come back to what is recorded in the logs. It may be possible to derive this informaiton, but you will have to parse the server logs directly and figure all of that out. If you go the home grown route I would suggest looking through the AWStats code to determine how to parse APACHE logs (if your web server is APACHE).

 

You can probably find some stuff on the web pretty easily. I'd keep searching for web statstics tools and I'm sure you'll find something if it can be done.

[sdlangers]

mskeel,

 

thanks for the reply - but this is a .NET forum, so i dont think you'll find many apache users here!!

 

i know it is possible to get the path a user takes - the larger commercial web stats programs do it, but i dont have $1k to spend on this

 

any other (IIS) ideas anyone?

[mskeel]

thanks for the reply - but this is a .NET forum' date=' so i dont think you'll find many apache users here!![/quote']By the way, you can run apache on windows... As a matter of fact we have a win2k3 server setup that uses apache instead of IIS. We wanted to avoid the huge security hole that is windows server. By using the 2k3 OS we get the unlimited connection limit and with apache we get the kind of web security you would actually want to have. Apache, PHP, MySQL... you can't go wrong there.

 

Back to the problem at hand -- to do this yourself (not too many open source/free stat analyzers for closed source/big bucks servers), the best place to start would be with the HTTP logs. Parse and analyze the HTTP logs for whatever HTTP server you are using and determine if the sort of informaiton you want can be derived from the information recorded by those logs. If it is not, you would next have to investigate modifying your web scripts to write out additional information to the logs or to make adjunct logs. Regardless, you will eventually have to go through and parse some kind of a recorded record of who visited your site. This basically boils down to a data analysis exercise.

[sdlangers]

yeah - but i dont want to install apache on win2k3 - while it may be secure on other servers, i heard there are holes with it when you install it parallel with IIS on windows

 

anyway - im not a LAMP developer - i use .NET and a fully MS platform - and this is a .NET forum - so i'm looking for some advice in these areas

 

also - i dont want to have to write an analyser myself - thats my original question - i just want to know if anyone knows of a cheap or free one that works on IIS

[PlausiblyDamp]

http://www.thefreecountry.com/webmaster/loganalyzers.shtml

[mskeel]

Hey, man...right tools for the job -- no matter what they are. That's all I'm saying.

 

Searching the web I turned up several freebies, though none with the functionality you desire. Sourceforge might be another good place to look. The ideal, I think, would be to find something that is open source (free) that does most of what you want it to do, and you can easily modify to do the rest. AWStats is good becuase all you have to do is write a new filter for IIS logs (or search the web a little) and then you can do all kinds of great stuff. Even extend the functionality to perhaps do what you need it to do.

 

Good luck to you on your quest.