Web Stats: Log File Analysis Is Still Most Accurate
By Jason Faulkner on Jul 3, 2009 in Daily Tips, Internet & The Web | comments(6)
A couple of days ago, I posted about Piwik which is a Google Analytics alternative. These two gather information the same way: via javascript. While this is gives great insight into your visitors, it is not 100% reliable because of script blockers. Basically, if a visitor is running a script blocking utility (i.e. NoScript), unless the user has specifically set the script domain as trusted, it will not run which means no stats.
All this just means you shouldn’t forget about log file analysis for web traffic. While you usually cannot get the same amount of detail as the javascript variety, when you have logging on your web server every visit is recorded, regardless. For a great log analysis tool, check out AWStats. I have used this for many years on my servers and it is fantastic.
Granted only a small percentage of people use script blockers, but if you run a tech blog (like this site) a higher percentage of your visitors may be using one which can affect your traffic stats. When you use log file analysis, you know every visit is captured.

