Heya all,
I hope all of you have had a great three-day weekend. I know I needed it.
Recently InterTech has rolled-out the OneStat web analytics reporting package to all of us. We have long needed a better site stats solution than their old AWStats. However many of you have noticed the drop in page views associated with OneStat and wondered what was the reason.
Well the reason is not a fault with OneStat. It was actually a fault with AWStats. To understand why, we need to understand AWStats and how it works.
AWStats is an open source web analytics reporting tool, suitable for analyzing data from Internet services such as a web server. The way AWstats gathers this information is by parsing and analyzing server log files, and then producing HTML reports for review. By analyzing the log files this is where the fault lies. When it reads a page view, it shows every page loaded from the server. That is fine for static pages. However, when a page is hosting another page through an iFrame, then that is where the fault happens.
Intertech uses iframes for much of the box group content on your websites. So, for example, if your home page has 3 iframes that load inside it, then the AWStats would count 4 total page views. One for the home page itself, and one for each of the pages loaded in the iframes. Neat huh? Not really.
Entercom Digital has been aware of this problem since before moving to InterTech. We have worked with ITM to solve this as soon as possible and in the mean time, work was done to remove all iframed pages from the reports with limited success. What was needed was a different way to generate the reports.
That is where OneStat comes in.
OneStats method for gathering the data is different than the AWStas. It uses Javascript to “ping” a central server of each page load that has the Javascript code added to it. ITM has placed this code in the footer content of each website. So any page that uses the footer box group will have the OneStats code and this be counted. So this excludes all iframed pages, because those pages do not include the footer content.
So I hope I did not bore you to death. However, we felt a detailed explanation was due.
Personally, I would prefer accurate reports as upposed to wrong reports. Plus it is unique visitors that I think is the better number and that has changed little.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.
~n
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Now playing: Climber – Foxes
Hey Y’all, I’m wrapping up implementing the OneThingNW site enhancements to the Seattle version of the site. Portland has done a decent job of creating a nice back-end for this that is relatively easy to replicate. For use by all of the markets, we will need to tidy a few things up. However none of that is a show-stopper.