In the second of this regular column which reviews software which is used by Exploit Interactive we report on two externally-hosted web statistics services which are used to provide details of use of the web site.
Exploit Interactive aims not only to provide a dissemination channel for the EU's Telematics For Libraries programme, but also to provide advice and guidance to members of the European library and information community. In particular we can provide advice based on the experiences we have gained in providing this web magazine.
In early January 2000 we introduced two externally-hosted Web statistical services on the Exploit Interactive web site. In this article we report on our experiences.
Most people are interested in web statistics. The statistics may be needed to justify the costs of the service, to monitor where the visitors are coming from, to investigate how the web site is being used or to detect broken links or other problems with the web site.
But it can be difficult to provide access to web statistics to a range of information providers. There may be a cost for the software - although software such as Analog is freely available, software which provides richer functionality may have to be purchased. Once the software has been obtained effort must be spent in installing the software, configuring the web server and managing the log files. Although this can, and should, be automated, it may be difficult to allow, say, departmental information providers to carry out data mining of their data. These difficulties can be compounded for departmental or project web sites, which may not have dedicated IT support.
A number of externally-hosted services for providing web statistics are available, including NedStat [1], SiteMeter [2], SuperStats [3] and Stats4All [4]. Such services can eliminate any licence costs, and can minimise ongoing maintainace costs.
These service typically work by providing a small icon which is included on pages on the web site. When a visitor accesses a page containing the icon, a request for the image is sent to the company hosting the service. The request is logged. The log file may store not only the date and time of the request, but also a variety of additional information, such as the referer (sic) field (how did the visitor get to the page) and the search engine query string (if the visitor used a search engine to get to the page, what search term did they enter).
In addition to information which will be recorded on the local web server's log file, the externally-hosted services often include Javascript code which can interrogate the visitor's client machine and obtain information on the operating system, browser, screen resolution, etc).
Arguably one of the advantages of externally-hosted web statistical analysis services
is the ease of access to the reports. Typical clicking an icon (such as the icon
to be found near the bottom of the page)
will provide access to the information. The Exploit Interactive
statistics provided by SiteMeter are freely available [5] and
examples of the reports are shown below.
SiteMeter is used to provide site (as opposed to page) statistics. Exploit Interactive has been using SiteMeter since 4 January 2000. Figure 1a gives a graphical representation of the numbers of page views and visits during February 2000. Figure 1b shows the browsers and browser versions which have accessed the web site.
 Figure 1a: Numbers of page views and visits in February 2000 |
 Figure 1b: Pie chart of the browsers and browser versions which have accessed the web site |
Other features of SiteMeter include:
In addition to the graphical display a weekly email summary can be received, as shown below.
Exploit Interactive
(sm2-exploit-home)
-- Site Summary ---
Visits
Total ........................ 5,234
Average per Day ................. 71
Average Visit Length .......... 3:02
This Week ...................... 436
Page Views
Total ....................... 14,010
Average per Day ................ 189
Average per Visit .............. 2.7
This Week .................... 1,010
http://sm2.sitemeter.com/stats.asp?site=sm2-exploit-home
--- Visits this Week ---
Day
Hour 3/10 3/11 3/12 3/13 3/14 3/15 3/16 Total
---- ----- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------
...
9 6 0 1 1 8 3 3 22
10 2 1 3 4 11 5 4 30
11 7 2 8 3 5 7 7 39
12 5 1 12 5 6 6 4 39
13 3 1 4 4 5 4 1 22
14 3 3 1 4 0 0 7 18
15 0 2 1 2 1 2 8 16
16 0 1 1 4 2 0 4 12
17 0 0 1 4 2 7 4 18
...
------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------
56 21 40 79 91 69 80 436
--- Page Views this Week ---
Day
Hour 3/10 3/11 3/12 3/13 3/14 3/15 3/16 Total
---- ----- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------
...
9 11 0 1 3 11 17 12 55
10 4 2 4 5 17 10 5 47
11 12 7 11 10 8 8 11 67
12 14 8 23 10 8 12 6 81
13 8 1 10 7 16 6 1 49
14 7 3 1 7 0 0 12 30
15 0 13 2 3 1 2 8 29
16 0 1 2 7 4 0 5 19
17 0 0 1 6 2 12 7 28
..
------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------
137 47 69 162 157 213 225 1,010
SiteMeter provides a management interface which can be used to customise the display. It also allows the public display of the information to be suppressed.
Exploit Interactive has also been evaluating the NedStat externally-hosted statistical service. With NedStat a unique id is used to enable statistics for individual pages to be provided. An example of output from NedStat is shown below. The summaries are taken from the statistics for the article on "Building Europe's Largest Library", published in Exploit Interactive issue 4 [6]. Access to the latest statistics is also available [7].
Statistics from 7 January 2000, 10:00
Compiled on 17 March 2000, 09:16
Total number of pageviews: 795
Top day so far: 14 January 2000 with 179 pageviews
  |
 |
Another example of use of NedStat can be see at the Information Research e-journal web site [8]. This web site has been using the service to record visits to their home page since 1 April 1998. From that date up to 17 March 2000 NedStat had recorded 37,783 page views - an indication that the service can provide information on long-term trends.
The versions of SiteMeter and NedStat described above are both available for free. Their business model is based on an income stream from the advertisements which are displayed when you access the service and licence fees for more fully-functioned versions of the software.
NedStat kindly donated a copy of their NedStats Pro service [9] for evaluation purposes. A brief summary if given below.
With NedStat Pro an invisible icon is placed on up to 25 key pages. Since there is no obvious icon to click on the data is not available to visitors. Access to the data is available by a URL, and, as an additional security feature, a username and password must be given.
An example of the information provided by NedStat Pro can be seen in Figure 4.
 Figure 4: NedStat Pro Interface |
Useful features of NedStat Pro include the ability to specify date ranges and being able to output results to comma-separated variable (CSV) files for post-processing locally.
As mentioned in a recent Ariadne article [10] there is growing interest in the use of externally-hosted Web services. But are remote services reliable? Ellen S. Gordon, Nedstat's Marketing Communications Manager, provided answers to the following questions.
How useful are externally-hosted Web statistics services such as Nedstat and SiteMeter? For a web magazine such as Exploit Interactive they appear to be very useful. From a management point of view we require site statistics. However individual author's of article will be more interested in accesses to their article. A combination of SiteMeter's and Nedstat's services enable both of these requirements to be satisfied.
These service, do, of course, have their limitations. They will typically only provide detailed information for a short period, for example, the last month, and it is not normally possible (with the free versions of the services) to carry out "data-mining". They will also not provide information about, say, errors which will be available in server log files. The services also have a dependency of the availability of the remote service and the network. This may be a concern to some, although as network performance and reliability increases the dangers should be reduced.
An important point to be born in mind is that meaningful web statistics can be difficult to obtain, as described elsewhere in this issue [11]. Externally-hosted Web statistics services are dependent on the use of graphical icons. Text browsers, browsers with images switched off and robot software will not be recorded by these services. However, since the images are non-cachable objects, these service should overcome the problem with missing hits which affects server log files.
How do the figures provided by these services compare with figures produced by conventional web statistical analysis packages? This is a question we intend to address in the next issue of Exploit Interactive.
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
England
BA2 7AY
URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk>
Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
For citation purposes:
Brian Kelly, "Software in Use: Externally-Hosted Statistical Software",
Exploit Interactive, issue 5, April 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/software-used/>
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