I went shopping around for a new flavor of website statistics. What I found is that the commercial products, dare I say are really standing out from the opensource programs. I have used Webalizer and Awstats on linux. When I first used Awstats years ago, it wasn’t really all that impressive, but the new features that have been addded makes it a competing product with Urchin 4. The only thing I cant seem to find in it is popular “paths” visitors took around the site.
In comes ClickTracks, a new appraoch to looking at the black and white numbers. It goes as far as overlaying stats right overtop of your webpage. They term it “in context display”. Either way it is some real eye candy for the business owner who knows little about computers and only wants to see how changes and ad campaigns has effected the web site traffic. Clicktracks has several other appealing features, but the golden nugget is the A/B split and time split. Their program will archive snapshots of your website and then show side-by-side comparison so that you can determine how even the smallest change to your website effects your traffic.
I do belive that Awstats is still useful for the raw numbers and if you are technically savy enough to make custom url variable tracking work for you. Also, awstats will grap stats for email and ftp servers that could prove useful. Hopefully the project continues on in 2006.
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