![]() And since GA doesn’t read your logs, you also save a lot of processing power for the stats. This is mostly more useful compare to having visitor’s IP. GA does a great job instead for displaying from what country and cities are the visitors coming from. After many years, I’ve learned that it’s fun having a specific IP address for the stats, but it’s not that useful (in the general overview for checking the stats, not for security reason I mean). This is certainly one of the most annoying feature and yet… Not really. Their IP address, because it’s part of their privacy policy. Google will also block a specific information of your visitors to you. Of course, that means sharing your “precious” website statistics with someone else. All of these are sent back to Google to be stored in a database so that you can access your site statistics through, and only, the GA web interface. Google won’t be able to read directly your private log file from your HTTP service, but instead, you need to install a short portion of HTML code inside each of your website’s page to let Google Analytics get the tracking of all your visitors. First of all, by using GA, you agree right from the start to allow Google to be able to compile for their own usage all the statistics of your website’s visitors. The setup compared to AWStats is very different. I call that visitor tracking – more on that later. In itself, GA is revolutionary because it was one of the first to bring something new to the table that the other statistics platform didn’t offered. Then a couple of years later, in 2005 to be more precise, came Google Analytics. Check out the AWStats demo here (if you can call that a demo). Also for the record, the processing power needed from the server for parsing the logs are pretty low compared to the modern tools, but you still need some. Other platforms existed and are still using the same principle (Webalizer, Analog, etc.). AWStats simply read the log file and parse the content to another text file for it’s own purpose, really easy to setup and debug. You could get your visitor’s IP address, most popular pages being viewed, used browsers, referrers, etc. Being able to look at the statistics of all the visitor in a simple HTML page without having to go through all the logs was really fantastic. But 10 years ago this was a time saving tool. Argh my eyes, they are bleeding!ĪWStats being the oldest and simplest of all, you install it on your web server and using perl and cgi script, it will simply read the logs of your webpage from your HTTP service, like Apache or IIS and will then digest the logs to be displayed in an HTML page for easier reading. But let me start at the beginning, how each platform works.Ī typical web server log file, now imagine that a thousand time. ![]() The biggest difference with the modern’s one are that they offer more feature, like goals, visitors tracking, alarms, etc. In fact, all of the modern statistics tools, like Google Analytics, Open Web Analytics and Piwik still give the same information, albeit in a different format. ![]() At its core, AWStats is the simplest and most straight forward statistics reporting tools. One of the oldest and most popular at that time was AWStats. So quickly people started developing something to resolve that. ![]() You could read the logs files in text format of your web server, but this was rather a tedious and painstaking job. This is not really a feature comparison but rather a look inside each one of them on how they work internally and externally.Ī long time ago, in an Internet corner far, far away, there weren’t too many choices for tracking the statistics of visitors on a website. I have and still use the following : AWStats, Google Analytics (GA), Open Web Analytics (OWA) and Piwik. This is my personal experience using 4 different platforms for tracking all the statistics of visitors on the different web sites that I manage.
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