Visitor tracking program for subdomains?

[Joshua Clinard]

Does anyone know how to install a visitor tracking program like latest visitors for sub-domains? I'd really like to be able to see what pages people are clicking on recently.

[Ron]

A long time ago, I installed "hitmat", a perl-based hit counter available from "the crypt"... hang on a moment, I'll find the addy...

Ok, I'm back. http://getcruising.com/crypt/

The script will give you what pages have been hit, by month, by day, etc., etc. It also will store a log of visitor's IP and similar info.

The problem is, it's very old now, and I'm sure there are products that will allow you to visually trace through a visitor's path (this doesn't). Also, you must add a bit of code on each page in your site, and it's gotta be different for each page.

I also use sitemeter.com's free account. That won't tell you what pages have been hit, but will give you things for the last 100 visitors like rankings of entry pages, exit pages. It shows referrer for the last 100, and visit details (eg visit length, pages visited).

It also tracks unique visitors and counts them, better than just a homepage counter. The paid version ($6/month, I think) gives you all of this for the last 1000 visitors, but the account limits (50,000 page views/month) are not enough for my site anymore, so I'd have to move to their second level now (maybe $10) and so on, as my traffic is increasing surprisingly rapidly. Javascript code must be added to each page, but it's the same piece of code.

As far as something like Webalizer goes, it is available for your sub-domains from your Cpanel!

[Joshua Clinard]

Thanks for the info. Those stats from sitemeter.com look really neat. But I really don't want to put extra code on each page. What I am looking for is something like the latest visitors in cpanel, that just track that last file clicked on by each visitor. I need something that anylizes the server logs.

[Ron]

Well, if you're familiar with shell scripting at all, a quick-n-dirty sort(on IP addy) andperl (or awk or sed) to whip through the file and print out the last ".htm" or ".pl" or whatever for each IP might give you what you're looking for.

Sorry that I don't know of a log analyzer other than what CPanel offers -- I've never needed more than that and sitemeter.

If/when you find something... let me know! Thanks!

[Ron]

I just did a quick search on google for
"free apache log file analyzer"
and one of the hits was this directory page:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Comp.../Log_Analysis/

There are a number of descriptions of programs that might be helpful...

In fact, one of the open-source programs there might just have a module to break out search words from the referrer field. I wanted to use that to enhance the initial experience of visitors to my site who arrive via search engines.

For instance, a lot of visitors are searching on "photos" somewhere inside their search string, and are picking a forum page to visit from their results. When that happens, I consistently see them leave after only that single page view, certainly unhappy with the content.

What I would like to do is show them the page they've requested, along with large links to the real photos section.

To do that, there has to be code to recognize a search engine referrer string, and the ability to isolate individual tokens presented in the style of that particular engine.

Of course, I could always do that with just Yahoo, Google and MSN and call it a day....

Well, now I've rambled way too much.

[Joshua Clinard]

Well, I'm not familliar with shell scripting. If you are, would you mind whipping me up one real quick so I could see it in action? Then some other people might be able to get some use out of it too.

[Ron]

Sorry for the delay...

Email me a small sample (maybe a couple hundred lines) of your logfile output and I'll play with it a little bit.

The email addy is your name -at- oes. org

[Ron]

I just happened across a site that was encouraging users to look at their sitemeter stats

http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp...index&report=0

Nice traffic to look at!

[the_ancient]

just use the installed AWSTATS

you have to Hack the URL since the Jag Skin is not upto date with Subdomain Stats but use this Format


http://YOURDOMAIN.com:2082/awstats.pl?config=YOURSUBDOMAIN.YOUR DOMAIN.com& lang=en

remove the space between & and Lang also

[Joshua Clinard]

Actually, the Jag Skin does have the URL to subdomain stats. Just click on subdomain statistics, and click on the appropriate subdomain under AWStats. It does not have latest visitors though.