What website analytic recommendations can I get from you all?
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I have no idea where to start on this. It is not something I have even cared about prior to now.
Wanting to know general visitor information, browser, IP, region, etc.
This will be used for my daerma.com site for now, but for a different project once I have a solution I like.
Daerma.com is running WordPress 4 on CentOS7 in a Hyper-V VM located in a datacenter in downtown St. Louis.
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@JaredBusch You can sign up for Google Webmasters acccount and Google Analytics.
I also use Piwik for those clients who feel Google has too much info.
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I like Google Analytics although @scottalanmiller doesn't care for them. I have been happy with them, and they're free.
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thanks. signed up to analytics. too easy with WP plugin.
also did webmaster. not sure of the use yet for me. can see the use for others.
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I use Google Analytics as well but I'm not sure how accurate it is. Also I think things like AdblockPlus would break it. as well as some content filters.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
I use Google Analytics as well but I'm not sure how accurate it is. Also I think things like AdblockPlus would break it. as well as some content filters.
It is a script, so there are many ways to block it. Short of parsing Apache logs though, a script based tool is really the only thing I could see as being semi useful.
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@JaredBusch True. But I was referring to the fact that it's considered an ad side so the server side of it is more likely to be blocked. If something was hosted on your own site it would be unlikely to be blocked. Though I haven't found a good plugin for joomla or wordpress that's free for analytics.
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@ajstringham said:
I like Google Analytics although @scottalanmiller doesn't care for them. I have been happy with them, and they're free.
He leaves out the important parts and translates "they don't deliver reliably stats" into "doesn't care for them."
The bottom line is that a Content Delivery Network, which you should always be using, breaks Google Analytics and only your CDN knows how much traffic you are getting. Google will report much smaller numbers which are very misleading.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@JaredBusch True. But I was referring to the fact that it's considered an ad side so the server side of it is more likely to be blocked. If something was hosted on your own site it would be unlikely to be blocked. Though I haven't found a good plugin for joomla or wordpress that's free for analytics.
You can't really use a plugin, you need the analytics gathered before traffic gets to your site, not after.
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@scottalanmiller I don't understand what you are saying about the plugin.
Since you don't care for Google Analytics, have you tried Piwik? I have been using them since they were called phpMyVisites.
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@technobabble said:
@scottalanmiller I don't understand what you are saying about the plugin.
Since you don't care for Google Analytics, have you tried Piwik? I have been using them since they were called phpMyVisites.
Looks nice but has the same issue as GA.... it will never see the traffic so it can't really collect the data. Because we use a CDN, more than half of all of the traffic is served by caches and our web servers never see the requests.
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With Piwik you can place the javascript on the CDN. Forum post here.
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Interesting. I'm in the car but will check that out.
