WebSTAT In ActionWebSTAT is the best web statistics program I have used. I am a freelance web developer and run several web sites for my clients. WebSTAT's analysis tools allow me to easily manage my statistics tracking for each of the websites I run. -Randall S., Web Developer/Consultant |
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We had stated in our newsletter that we were going to create a new tier called Premium Plus, which we would use to put newer features from this point forward. We have decided not to do that at this time and simply make the newer features available to existing Premium account subscribers. That said, there is a new report Premium account subscribers can use to track their advertising campaign traffic. It works especially well with Google AdWords, and any other link tracking you'd like to keep tabs on. The process for configuring it can be found in the help, by clicking on the question mark icon in the upper right hand corner of the configuration screen and the Campaign Tracking report. Please give us your feedback on this report, as we'd like to hear any suggestions and/or criticism of how it is working.
So many Free subscribers have wondered why we don't offer a visual counter that we started wondering ourselves. In any case, here it is! The ability for Free accounts to display a visual counter on their sites is configurable now in the ACCOUNT -> EDIT MY VISUAL COUNTER options (the ACCOUNT button is located at the top right of your browser window after you login). Once you configure your counter settings, it will be immediately displayed on your site from that point on.
We have changed the "Recent Visitor Details" report to now be called "Visitor Details". The reason for the change is because we now display both past and present visitor details. This is a change that we've heard many of you repeatedly ask for, and so we've delivered above and beyond what we originally promised by providing 100% of all your past and present Visitor Details, starting officially from February 2nd. Before we had promised that we would save only the last 50 visitor details of each day, as this data is large and takes up quite a bit of space on our database servers. However, we decided that if we only kept this data for current PREMIUM account subscribers that we could pull off saving all of the data. Visitor Details now show up slightly different from what you may be used to seeing. Now, since PREMIUM account subscribers will be able to view ALL of their visitors, the data will be broken down to show 25 visitors per page. Page #1 will start with the first visitor to your site for that day. The last page will have the most recent visitors to your site, so the order of the data displayed is more intuitive. Before, the data was shown with the most recent visitors to your site at the top and ordered so that the oldest (or 50th) visitor for the current day were at the very bottom.
Automatic page naming has now been implemented. This will be extremely useful for sites that use third party software, like Miva Merchant, or other shopping cart software which is properly configured to use unique TITLE tags for each page. Be warned, however, that if you enable this feature and you have multiple pages on your site that use the same exact HTML TITLE string, those pages will be counted as one and the same with WebSTAT. It would be a good idea to do a quick runthrough of your site to make sure that all of the pages have a unique HTML TITLE string before turning it on (for more information, check out the FAQ under Page Naming). To turn the feature on, login to your account, go to your ACCOUNT menu, select the option "Edit My Account Preferences", and then turn on the feature called "Use HTML Titles for Page Naming". Save those settings, and the feature has been enabled. If you have more questions, or need further clarification, please contact us.
We finally implemented the ability for the reports to be ordered by visitors instead of only by pageviews, which we have been meaning to do for a long time now. Premium account owners will default to viewing by Visitors instead of Page Views now when they login, but this can be easily switched back to view by Page Views by selecting the option to do so at the top portion of the report chart header, right underneath the bar and pie charts. The option is a toggle between viewing by Visitors and by Page Views. This may initially cause some confusion for PREMIUM account owners because there is not any data when viewing by Visitors past a few days back, since the data has just started being collected recently. Switch back to view the reports by Page Views to generate your reports for the data collected last year.
We hope you are as excited as we are about our newer, better visitor tracking. There are several things that have changed, and several things that may appear as though they are not working correctly for the first day, so read on if you want to know the details. Visitor: WebSTAT defines a “Visitor” as a person (physical machine) that is either a returning visitor (been to your site before) or a unique visitor (first time visitor to your site). A visitor is counted one time per 24 hour period. So if, for example, a person comes to your site at 11:59 PM and views pages until after midnight, that person would be counted as 2 visitors since they span the midnight hour (once per day). New (Unique) Visitor: WebSTAT defines a “unique visitor” as a visitor that has not been to your website previously (a first-time visitor). Return Visitor: WebSTAT defines a “return visitor” as a visitor that has been to your website at least once on a previous day. Using cookies has cleared up a big problem WebSTAT was having with correctly counting AOL visitors, since AOL visitor's IP addresses would often change with each visit to your site. Some of you may notice your visitor count drop slightly. This is normal and good, as the visitor count is now much more accurate and close to what it should be. We also developed some new algorythms for identifying visitors uniquely (for the current day only) if they do not have cookies enabled. If you have Cookie Tracking turned off in your preferences, you can not expect the visitor reports to give you accurate information. All visitors will be tracked as Unique Visitors and will be at least accurate for each 24 hour period (you will just need to ignore the Returning Visitor fields, because they will give you no data).
If you notice anything that doesn't look right, or that seems to be off in any way, please notify us immediately so that we can take a look at it. This update
entailed significant changes to our logging system and every single user's account in our databases, but we do believe it was well worth it and think you'll be
happy with it too.
Reports that were changed were -
Many of the RETURNING visitor reports won't have any data for the first day, since all the visitors now coming to your site are having a cookie set in their
browsers for the first time and are all being counted as unique visitors. As the days go on you'll start to see more and more significant data in these
reports. If you have any further questions about what each report does, please click on the help icon located at the top of each report for a description
of the report and what uses it may have for you.
Sprint, our internet carrier, experienced a regional outage for several hours this evening when
their backbone router in Cheyenne Wyoming failed -- a result of an earlier scheduled maintenance to replace faulty
hardware that went awry. Once again we apologize for the inconvenience. If the instability of the Sprint
network persists, we will switch to a new carrier.
We are sorry for the inconvenience and frustration many of you felt while trying to access your stats today. Since
sometime early this morning our time (Mountain time), Sprint had some hardware failures that severely limited our bandwidth
and kept most people from being able to view their statistics. By some lucky break, enough bandwidth was alloted to our logging
servers to continue logging stats without interruption for the most part. We do not believe logging was affected much, if at
all. Sometimes hardware just fails and, despite the fact that we do everything here we can to prevent downtime, some things
are still completely out of our control. Thank you all for your patience and understanding.
Thanks to all of you for your great suggestions and compliments, they helped us out tremendously in fixing the
remaining problems with the redesign and the new features. We have received so much email from you that it will
take some time to respond back to you all, but we will try to get back to everyone who wrote in.
WebSTAT is about to get a big face-lift and the changes are not just cosmetic! The new features include
the ability to select custom date ranges, better looking reports and graphs, more intuitive menus, and a
built-in help system to help you understand reports and how they can be useful to you. In order to take advantage
of the newer features, you will need to use Internet Explorer Version 5 and above, Netscape Version 6 and
above, or Opera version 6 and above. We need to do more testing on other browsers before we make this
avalailable for them. The beta server is located at: beta.webstat.com.
Please let us know what you think.
Premium account owners which manage more than one account can now manage multiple accounts through what we are calling a "Master Account"! The Master Account feature allows you to login to one location and easily switch between and manage as many Premium accounts as you'd like. This service is provided free of charge. To signup for a Master Account, or to learn more information, click HERE.
The new Data Center that houses our servers was hit with a 'Denial of Service'
attack against its Cisco routers. We believe the attack was related to the
vulnerability announced by CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) yesterday.
The result was that little traffic could get through the affected router to our servers which were, consequently, bandwidth starved. We worked much of the night and most of the morning with our web host to diagnose and resolve the problem. We believe it has finally been resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
WebSTAT has completed its move to a new data center. We were able to do it faster than anticipated, with minimal disruption to service. This was a big job because we physically had a lot of machines to move and configure. We anticipate that our new host will be faster (we're buying more bandwidth) and more reliable than the previous one, which had power circuit problems on several occasions last week, precipatating our search for a new provider. We appreciate your patience during the move.
Two more reports are now available for paid accounts:
Regions: This report will show you states and provinces in the United States and Canada that your visitors are coming from. We are not yet able to get this information for regions in the rest of the world.
Three new reports are ready for your viewing pleasure!
Recent Visitor Details: This report will show you just about every detail we can collect from each individual user. The report's duration is only for the current day, and past day's visitor details cannot be accessed. As well, we have modified the Recent Visitors and Frequent Visitors reports so you can click on the visitor to find out their specifics. Remember, this report is only for the current day.
We have several more reports coming very soon and many new features planned to get done as quickly as possible. This is an exciting time for WebSTAT's development! If you have suggestions, we like to hear them, so please get into touch with us to let us know what things are important for you. In the meantime, stay tuned for more enhancements coming your way!
The countries report has been completely redone, both on the backend and the frontend. The data being collected is now MUCH more accurate than it was before (95%). We are excited about the changes coming up in WebSTAT and hope you are too. There are several more reports coming within the next week, so check back often!
New reports are finally here, with many more improvements in the pipeline! The new reports are as follows: Visitor Paths, Entry Pages, Exit Pages, and Cookies Enabled.
Some of you may experience problems logging in (due to some systemwide changes that we made that didn't apply correctly to all accounts). Please email us and we will immediately fix the problem for you. It would not affect the collection of your statistics, only whether or not you can login.
Enjoy the new reports and give us any feedback you might have!
WebSTAT now offers Trial accounts which, unlike our free accounts, allow you to try all of our reports. Now you can fully "try before you buy". WebSTAT also now accepts prepayments for 6 months or 1 year via Credit Card, Purchase Order, Check, or Paypal.
WebSTAT is in the process of upgrading and adding new database servers. This should result in even faster service and greater redundancy of data. Some accounts will be shuffled around to less busy servers to help balance the load more evenly. Customers should not experience any down time.
After several days of downtime for free accounts, and after a lot of frustration with unforseen problems in the upgrading process, we brought free accounts successfully back online again. Everything appears to be running smoothly. However, if you happen to notice anything at all out of the ordinary, please contact us and let us know. There may be a few bugs roaming about, despite the fact that we tested it thoroughly, and we feel fairly comfortable with the state it is in. There were a lot of changes that needed to be made on the back end, so there should not be anything noticably different to the site itself except that the site should be overall faster and more reliable. Once again, let us know if you see anything wrong. Thanks for your patience during this period.
We have had many many people complain that WebSTAT wasn't correctly logging their framed pages statistics. We have finally raised the priority to the highest level for this problem and have implemented full support for framed pages. There is another set of code tags that will need to be generated and pasted into only one of your pages, if you are a framed site owner/webmaster. To get instructions on how to do this, please visit our FAQ HERE.
Many people lately have asked, "What do I do if I have one dynamic script which generates all my HTML pages for me? Even though the script is generating completely different pages, they all show up as one entry in the 'Visited Pages' report." We have implemented a way to give your pages a descriptive name so that dynamic scripts can show up as individual pages rather than just giving you the script's name in the "Visited Pages" report. This can come in handy also for people who'd rather see a descriptive name for their pages rather than a URL. To get instructions on how to do this, please visit our FAQ HERE.
Many people have complained that their links displayed in the reports for their Visited Pages and Referring URLs were always lowercased, and that sometimes the URLs were actually case-sensitive, causing the links in their reports to be disfunctional. We have changed it so that WebSTAT now logs all of these entries, including Search Engine Keywords, in their original case-sensitive form. Most people will notice this change take effect tomorrow (20th of September 2002).
We have had enough demand for the visual counter to motivate us to add one to the overall Premium account package. If you are a Premium account owner and you would like to display a visual counter on your pages instead of doing the invisible tracking, simply login to your account, go to your 'Account' menu (silver folder icon in the upper right hand corner of your browser window with the word 'account' under it), select 'Edit My Account Preferences', and then click the 'Change Counter' button on the bottom of the resulting form. The option is given to display either the total cumulative visitors or page views to your site since the creation of your WebSTAT account. There are about 40 different counter styles to choose from, and we may be adding more soon. Once the counter style is saved, the image will begin displaying immediately on your webpages that have the WebSTAT code tags in them.
We have just increased the maximum entries per report from 30 to 100. This means that before, when you could only
see the top 30 Visited Pages, you can now see the top 100. You will only be able to view the top 100 from today forward (as WebSTAT has not been saving anything past the top 30 up to this point). This applies to Premium account owners only and is available in these reports:
When you login now your default view mode is going to be set to Graphs, which means that you will start seeing Pie Charts, Bar Graphs, and Line Plots! Don't worry if you aren't used to this new way of viewing things yet. You can easily switch back to the classic view by selecting the Chart button in the "Select View Mode:" box which will appear on the right hand side of your screen (under the calendar control) for the reports that it pertains to (all of them EXCEPT the General Summary report). We are really excited to offer you these new features and have more in store. Stick with us, we are striving to offer you the best service around!
We have added several new reports which people have been asking for, and which were long overdue. The reports are:
We have added a new report (Javascript Versions) to the Premium Accounts. This is a very helpful report for the
Javascript developer to determine which Javascript Version is being used most. This can help ensure your website
is compatible with as many visitors' browsers as possible.
We have finally gotten our affiliate program up and running. There may be some minor changes
to it within the next few days. Everyone go sign up! You can make some good money off of it!
There was some planned downtime early this morning while we physically moved WebSTAT's
servers offsite to a new location. This completes a step in our move to guarantee 99.9%
uptime as we now have backup power, and better cooled facilities for our equipment. We
appreciate your patience with little things like this. In the long run it will make
WebSTAT a much more reliable service with much more accurate results.
Stick with us, you won't be disappointed! We have just implemented a few new features:
1. Downloadable reports (Printer Friendly, Excel, Acrobat)
Once again, these newer features are only going to be seen by those who have Premium accounts.
Free accounts may notice a change in the overall look and feel, but that's mostly it. We hope
you enjoy the new features! We have more on their way!
We have just implemented some upgrades which will make WebSTAT even better than ever.
Paid accounts will now be able to get full stats for any particular day (e.g. keywords, visited pages,
browsers, etc.) rather than just a monthly summary. This is a feature many of you have been requesting and
is the first major upgrade since we implemented WebSTAT v2.0 in July. We have more upgrades in the pipeline!
We are committed to making WebSTAT the best value in web statistics on the net!
We have upgraded all accounts that used the old WebSTAT (pre July 2001 accounts) to use the new. The data for
previous months has been
converted to the new system. In order for the new system to collect data correctly from this point forward ALL
USERS who signed up before July 2001 MUST replace the webstat tags in their html pages with the new
code. The new tags may be obtained by logging into your account on this server with the same username and
password that you had on the old server, and clicking on the "Generate Tags" link. The old WebSTAT will be
decommissioned in the next couple of weeks.
After much blood, sweat, and tears we are proud to present WebSTAT Version 2.0! We are putting the site live with the hope that everything will work as expected. We have done a lot of testing, but as you may or may not know how that goes, there are just going to be things we didn't even think of that you, our users, are going to have to help us find and fix.
If you have any problems or see anything that doesn't look quite right, we'd really really appreciate your
input. Send an email
to us about tips, suggestions, problems, etc...
Thanks!! |