Web Analytics Apps That Deliver

M

mapguy

Banned
Dec 27, 2008
54
2
0
Hey guys,

I know everyone here is always concerned with tracking and optimizing. (Like we should be.)

Here is a blog post written by an affiliate marketer with a couple tools that you might not have heard of around here, but are powerful and can help you earn/save more $$$.

Web Analytics Apps That Deliver | jmarbach.com
 


Aren't you guys who use piwik worried about the footprint that it leaves behind?

I'm considering using piwik so the data is all mine but I'm worried about the footprint.
 
FlatLine said:
Aren't you guys who use piwik worried about the footprint that it leaves behind?

I'm considering using piwik so the data is all mine but I'm worried about the footprint.
Click to expand...

Footprint?

please explain why you would be concerned about a footprint left by an opensource stats program used by hundreds of thousands websites of which %99 are legitimate.

Its like saying, don't use that Cutpress Wordpress theme because it leaves a footprint.


or am I missing something.
 
FlatLine said:
Aren't you guys who use piwik worried about the footprint that it leaves behind?
Click to expand...
That's exactly why I'm not using it. Since it's selfhosted you're the only one using it from your domain and it will reveal your network of sites or your blog farm to Google.
 
Been thinking about this, could you replace the direct link to your site with a link from a link shortener?
 
phrench said:
That's exactly why I'm not using it. Since it's selfhosted you're the only one using it from your domain and it will reveal your network of sites or your blog farm to Google.
Click to expand...

^^^^ this, are we just being paranoid or is this a legitimate concern?
 
phrench said:
That's exactly why I'm not using it. Since it's selfhosted you're the only one using it from your domain and it will reveal your network of sites or your blog farm to Google.
Click to expand...

and you think using Google Analytics helps?

Sorry but they are a registrar and can piece your network together anyway from your inbound and outbound links.
 
Theoretically, it should be faster than GA because your visitor's browser doesn't have to open an extra TCP/IP connection to other (Google) server (involving DNS and stuff) to load the ga.js code and the tracking pixel, it can load them through the same (already open) connection to your server as the main HTML page. Multiply this to the maximum number of visitors you have at the same time.
 
Vassilevsky said:
Theoretically, it should be faster than GA because your visitor's browser doesn't have to open an extra TCP/IP connection to other (Google) server (involving DNS and stuff) to load the ga.js code and the tracking pixel, it can load them through the same (already open) connection to your server as the main HTML page. Multiply this to the maximum number of visitors you have at the same time.
Click to expand...

Your browser will start a new http connection for every separate item on the page. It won't and can't 're-use' an existing http connection. Use a tool like firebug or fiddler to see what's actually going on when you load your page.

It's also highly unlikely that hosting your own pixel-based tracking system will ever be faster than using GA, once you get to significant load. This is because piwik writes to MySQL. Writing to MySQL does not scale well.

I hadn't really thought about the issue of hosting my own analytics on a single domain, and that being a tool for people to identify all the sites in my network.

You could partially get around this by creating a stats subdomain for every domain that you want to use piwik track. E.g if your site is cockmuncher.com , setup stats.cockmuncher.com to point to your piwik server. This may require hacking the piwik code, or fiddling with your apache setup to make piwik able to work on many different hostnames, but should be possible.

m
 
munky said:
E.g if your site is cockmuncher.com
Click to expand...

Ban for outing my landing page & main money maker.

I personally use a custom script that just records visits, referrers & other stuff to flat text files. Then daily I import them all to my master domain so all of my networks are visible through a single dashboard.

0 footprints, 100% reliable.

It's not nearly as comprehensive as analytics or anything but I don't care too fucking much about bounce rate & time spent on my site. If I built massive social sites I might have a different opinion.
 
munky said:
Your browser will start a new http connection for every separate item on the page. It won't and can't 're-use' an existing http connection. Use a tool like firebug or fiddler to see what's actually going on when you load your page.
Click to expand...
Yes, every file (resource) is a separate HTTP request (and you should write JS and CSS inside HTML). But they can all go through the same TCP/IP connection to the host, that is established once.

And if you load some JS or images from other hosts, your browser must resolve each host (send DNS queries), then establish TCP/IP connections to those hosts, and only then send HTTP requests to actually load files.

Personally I've seen that freakin' "Waiting for www.google-analytics.com..." status message countless times. And no, that's not of the slow connection, I'm on 10 Mbps Ethernet.
 
Would it be better to use something like statcounter instead of piwik?

I don't wanna give google anymore information than they need.
 
Best bet if you're really that worried about it is to use something like awstats, which works off the backend server logs and doesn't require you to insert anything in the page, unlike piwik or statcounter or GA.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom