So in that sense, If I want to improve a website, in terms of content and functionality and hope to get increased traffic from this change, analysing the page requests from month to month is sufficient enough to know that the website is 'performing better'
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Aengus Sent: 31 January 2006 13:38 To: Support for analog web log analyzer Subject: Re: [analog-help] Referring Site Report,and reporting only ondirectories/pages On Tuesday, January 31, 2006 6:08 AM [EDT], Jo Riley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hello everyone including Nigel, > > Is it possible to tailor the reports in Analog such that you are > given statistics for: > - unique visitors If you give your visitors persistent cookies, then you can count the number of cookies you handed out. Throw in a fudge factor for the users who regular disable or discard cookies, or who regularly use multiple browsers on one machine, or use multiple machines, and you've got a metric for "unique visitors". Of course, as http://analog.cx/docs/webworks.html explains, if you need a fudge factor, then you're in the realm of guesswork and handwaving anyway, and you're only kidding yourself if you insist on believing the numbers. (Obviously a site with 10,000 "visitors" measured this way is significantly "busier" than a site with only 2,000 visitors. But a site with only 5,000 visitors might actually be busier that a site with 6,000 visitors, depending on the type of visitors, and whether they are more or less likely to ply with they cookies. > - how long each unique visit is In these days of tabbed browsers, that's an even less meaningful metric - I often has 5 or 6 pages from a site open at the same time, that I only read later. If I open 1 page for your site, and spend 5 minutes reading it, is my "visit" longer or shorter than if I click through 4 pages in 2 minutes, and then close the page because it doesn't have what I want? (And don't get me started on the servers who "fix" the problem of people who don't keep cookies by putting the session information into the URL, so that you can't bookmark a page, or e-mail a URL to someone else, because the session key has expired!) Aengus +------------------------------------------------------------------------ | TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list: | http://lists.meer.net/mailman/listinfo/analog-help | | Analog Documentation: http://analog.cx/docs/Readme.html | List archives: http://www.analog.cx/docs/mailing.html#listarchives | Usenet version: news://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.analog.general +------------------------------------------------------------------------ +------------------------------------------------------------------------ | TO UNSUBSCRIBE from this list: | http://lists.meer.net/mailman/listinfo/analog-help | | Analog Documentation: http://analog.cx/docs/Readme.html | List archives: http://www.analog.cx/docs/mailing.html#listarchives | Usenet version: news://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.analog.general +------------------------------------------------------------------------
