Web Analytics & Stats

Question

We want to add tracking statistics to a web application we are building but are pretty unsure of how to go about it. (i.e. clicks, pageviews, unique visits etc)

Does anyone have any articles on the best way to go about incorporating tracking data into an application ? i.e. javascript tracking or IIS etc ?

We want to add tracking in as a ASP.NET MVC module - but we are unsure as to the best way to actually get the data and essentially 'track' this information ?

If anyone could help out - much appreciated.

Edit: just to be clear, we want to do this in-house and present the stats to our users as an additional fee module?

Answer 1

You can turn on the logging for IIS and then use the SQL Server Report Server Pack for IIS. It comes with many canned reports for your sites stats and then you could take it from there with your own custom reports.

You could also just use log parser to get the stats into a SQL Server DB and then you could use SQL from their to analyse and roll your own app.

Either way, you could modularize this and sell it as an add-on to your customer base.

Answer 2

You could use Piwik, you just need PHP version 5.1.3 or greater and MySQL version 4.1 or greater. As they say in their website, "Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics."

They have a demo on the official website so you can see if it's what you're looking for.

Answer 3

Google analytics is a popular service. You just insert a bit of javascript on every page that contains your sites name and Google tracks the data and provides all the report on a handy web based dashboard.

It's not an ASP.net MVC module like what you mentioned, but it will certain track stats for you and will be a lot simpler to set up than trying to code or integrate anything yourselves.

I'd look at analytics to begin with and only branch out to something more complex if it doesn't meet your requirements.

Answer 4

klabranche provided a holistic answer in terms of using logs of web server. I think using web server log is a a great way to analyse data of your web application.

That being said, depend on your web application and the scope of your analytics, just relay on web server log is not a good way to.

As you may know, web log does not record users behaviors like clicking certain tabs which may not trigger a web server request. Obviously your web log has no idea whether users clicked that tab or not, this may hurt your analyse.

Another you need to know is browser cache, this may create another black hole in your data.

RECAP

If you want to do a holistic analytics, you need to use two approaches, one is JavaScrip tag, another one is web log. Since both of them have shortages, combining them together will give you a complete picture.

Hope this helps