Thread: Best public stats tracking?

As the title suggest i know about awstats in cpanel , however whats the best stats tracker thats open to the public? which users etc can view?
Im using woopra for our forums but again its admin side only

Depends what you want the stats for. If it's for site analysis, google analytics seems to be the standard now - third party scripting issues aside, it's pretty good. However, because it's JS, it can only track your pages, not page resources like images, PDFs etc.

hmmm , well i will give Google a shot , just checked it out seems quite packed with stats features

If you're after open-source server-side for tracking resources or bandwidth breakdown, I've only found webalizer and awstats, both of which are fairly limited, and/or are a pain to install and configure. I usually end up rolling my own. Nobody seems particularly interested in this market, because people can get pretty much everything they need from GA for free, along with better unique tracking and automatic dismissal of most search/spam bots than server-side log processing can offer. You do lose non-JS users, but most people either don't seem to understand or care about them.

we offer Smartstats, but to be honest Google's offering is pretty boomin good!

Originally Posted by aguk

It has some downsides, like being from the "evil corporate empire", and losing non JS users

There's also the fact that you're embedding third party javascript into your site; although it's unlikely that google would be compromised, it's another attack vector that you should at least be aware of (especially with the DNS vulnerabilities etc that have been around lately).

Also remember that the data is tied to their system, and tied to the accounts within that system; there's no API to extract the raw data, and no facility to move site data between accounts.