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All those things are calculable from web logs.

by guelo 11y ago

coderdude 11y ago
How so? I'm willing to accept that I'm wrong if you can show any server log analytics package that is capable of that. It doesn't seem possible.
- guelo 11y ago
  If each request has a session cookie in the log it's easy to track a user's movements through your site, so you can figure out bounce rate, conversion etc no problem. Things like Piwik have pretty dashboards to generate whatever reports you want from server logs.
  - coderdude 11y ago
    Piwik looks interesting. I'm playing with the demo right now. It does look like they support goals[1]. I can't know for sure how effective it is but I will concede that log analytics is more powerful than I believed. [1]: http://piwik.org/docs/tracking-goals-web-analytics/ http://piwik.org/docs/tracking-goals-web-analytics/ For anyone who wants to play with the demo: http://demo-log-analytics.piwik.org/index.php?module=CoreHome&action=index&idSite=1&period=day&date=yesterday#?module=Dashboard&action=embeddedIndex&idSite=1&period=day&date=yesterday&idDashboard=1 http://demo-log-analytics.piwik.org/index.php?module=CoreHom...
  - czep 11y ago
    Designing good session identifiers for logging is not trivial. More importantly, with a lot of events happening in javascript, a lot of user interactions are occurring beyond the visibility of your server logs. Tracking js events is also clearly possible, but again, non trivial. I've been in more than one situation where we trusted GA more than our own logs.
shkkmo 11y ago
Some stuff, but if you want to emulate GA events you'll have to also implement some additional frontend code and a backend to log those events. I hope this is the direction that we see analytics moving. The information analytics provides developers is great, but I don't like the fact that this information is usually given to multiple third parties by using their analytics engines.
manigandham 11y ago
No they're not. As an example, bounces are commonly the last page where the user left without doing anything. How can you tell that from a simple server log line that says the page loaded? You cant see if they clicked on something or how long they read the page or what other actions they took. Most sites today also go far beyond basic pageviews and track all kinds of events on the page like scrolling rates, reading time, what other headlines you clicked or hovered over, etc. This is not possible without JS tracking.

All those things are calculable from web logs.

by guelo 11y ago

All those things are calculable from web logs.

How so? I'm willing to accept that I'm wrong if you can show any server log analytics package that is capable of that. It doesn't seem possible.

guelo 11y ago
If each request has a session cookie in the log it's easy to track a user's movements through your site, so you can figure out bounce rate, conversion etc no problem. Things like Piwik have pretty dashboards to generate whatever reports you want from server logs.
- coderdude 11y ago
  Piwik looks interesting. I'm playing with the demo right now. It does look like they support goals[1]. I can't know for sure how effective it is but I will concede that log analytics is more powerful than I believed. [1]: http://piwik.org/docs/tracking-goals-web-analytics/ http://piwik.org/docs/tracking-goals-web-analytics/ For anyone who wants to play with the demo: http://demo-log-analytics.piwik.org/index.php?module=CoreHome&action=index&idSite=1&period=day&date=yesterday#?module=Dashboard&action=embeddedIndex&idSite=1&period=day&date=yesterday&idDashboard=1 http://demo-log-analytics.piwik.org/index.php?module=CoreHom...
- czep 11y ago
  Designing good session identifiers for logging is not trivial. More importantly, with a lot of events happening in javascript, a lot of user interactions are occurring beyond the visibility of your server logs. Tracking js events is also clearly possible, but again, non trivial. I've been in more than one situation where we trusted GA more than our own logs.

shkkmo 11y ago

Some stuff, but if you want to emulate GA events you'll have to also implement some additional frontend code and a backend to log those events. I hope this is the direction that we see analytics moving. The information analytics provides developers is great, but I don't like the fact that this information is usually given to multiple third parties by using their analytics engines.

manigandham 11y ago

No they're not. As an example, bounces are commonly the last page where the user left without doing anything. How can you tell that from a simple server log line that says the page loaded? You cant see if they clicked on something or how long they read the page or what other actions they took. Most sites today also go far beyond basic pageviews and track all kinds of events on the page like scrolling rates, reading time, what other headlines you clicked or hovered over, etc. This is not possible without JS tracking.