Comments on: Online v. Log Analytics

By: Google, online ads and the economy

Google, online ads and the economy — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:45:54 +0000

[...] when G birthed Google Analytics into the world? How every website ever immediately started using it? While a significantly smaller [...]

By: On the new web metric, time spent on site | #comments

On the new web metric, time spent on site | #comments — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 12:02:59 +0000

[...] this not to say that page views and vists are not without their problems. But I strongly believe that is possible to accurately count page views (although not everyone does [...]

By: Scott Klein

Scott Klein — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 11:58:05 +0000

Sorry, I meant load-balanced servers with different parts of the site served on different platforms. This happens all the time.

Still, I agree with your fundamental point, that companies like Omniture spend tons of resources making their analytics insanely terrific and they tend to be the right way to go.

By: felix

felix — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 11:47:27 +0000

Good points, all. The thing is, if you are big and doing your own log analysis - you almost certainly are running custom code - existing log analsysis packages, I just don’t believe they are giving correct numbers. And if you are running a heterogenous site - you wouldn’t need to merge different log files together - unless you are saying that the site is load balanced among a set of heterogenous servers serving the same content - which doesn’t seem likely.
I think in general you are right - most companies simply do not have the resources to devote to analyzing their own logs. Companies like Omniture spend all day every day figuring out more smart ways to slice and dice the data, so I think they are the way almost everyone should go.

By: Scott Klein

Scott Klein — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 11:32:52 +0000

There are a few other good reasons to use javascript beacon based analytics. Let’s say you have a large heterogenous webserver farm, in which some pages are served from a bunch of linux/apache servers, while other pages are served from a bunch of windows/iis servers, etc. There is often no good way to concatenate log files from a lot of servers and run a log analysis tool within a reasonable window of time, especially if you’re pushing extra data on each request into the log files to do advanced analysis (and thus have gigantic log files).

Also, the log analysis packages have weak or nonexistent segmentation and even goal tracking capabilities. Admittedly, I’ve mostly used the free kind (awstats, etc.) but the beacon/service approach is clearly where the sophisticated development work is being done.

Of course, if you’re a commerce site and have metrics other than page impressions that you care about, your e-commerce application more than likely has the reporting features you need to do baseline reporting — though, still, you need something more sophisticated to track KPI’s like cart abandons, sales funnels, visits-to-orders, etc. Even the iTunes Music store uses Omniture, to do sophisticated path analysis, etc.

Then again, with beacon-based approaches, you have to jump through hoops to analyze your error pages (404, 500, etc.), and beacon-based approaches make it a bit more difficult to accurately count non-html downloads (images, pdfs, etc.). Page weight — and data transfer speed — is probably also something easier to analyze with log files.

I watch my traffic live using ApacheTop, which uses log files to build a live window of traffic size (requests/sec) and destination. That’s something I’ve yet to see Omniture do with the same level of technical detail.

So, like everybody, we end up using several simultaneous methods, including log analysis and a bunch of beacons.