Your favorite free website tracker and why

[slipper]

I currently use Site Meter but i was curious what you folks use and why you prefer it.

 

[r.j.s]

I like Google Analytics ... it's easy to implement and gives me all the data I need.

 

[angelwatt]

I've been using AWStats, but I won't try to convince you it's great. I find it useful, but could be better. I haven't really tried other stuff out yet as I generally only care about a couple things like most visited pages, casual glance at OSes and browsers, and search keywords/phrases people use to find me.

 

[notnek]

I like Google Analytics for main tracking purposes but also run Woopra for interesting stats.

 

[seventeen]

I've taken a look at quite a few different options, and all of them seem to be way off from one another.

so not nowing which to trust, i decided I would just set up a database to track pageloads by page title, timestamp, ip, user agent and referring url with a simple php function.

If you know SQL and a bit of regex you can just run queries to see what you're numbers are. unique visitors, pageloads, top pages, top referring urls, and even some much more complex ones... all based on whatever timeframe you wish.

You could set up something with php to track it all, every first of the month, dumb the database and save the calculated numbers to a text file or something to save disk space. although I imagine some sites may get too much traffic for the use of a database like this to be very efficient of your server resources.

could be an interesting project to build your own stats tracking script maybe with some ajax to refresh every couple of minutes. I always hated how awstats only updated like every 12 hours.

 

[angelwatt]

I always hated how awstats only updated like every 12 hours.

You can change that easily enough. I have a cron job that runs every hour.

 

[omniinvoice]

I use both Google Analytics and Stat Counter.com

 

[vivithemage]

google analytics, and AWStats.