[Web Analytics] My, How Things Have Changed
I’m currently in the middle of writing the Web Analytics chapter for the book, and my gosh - things have changed so much in fifteen years. This screenshot is from the program “GetStats”, one of the first web analysis tools to exist. I ran it using watchingwebsites.com logs (I had to parse them through sed & awk to change their log format to CLF for it to work). Notice how it took 7 and a half minutes to process as many lines!
I was talking to the author, Kevin Hughes about GetStats and the state of web analytics when he first wrote it. “Actually getstats wasn’t the first Web server log analysis tool, but it was very influential in terms of the way the data was presented and summarized. Roy Fielding with wwwstat was the first as far as I can recall to present statistics in an easy-to-read paragraph summary form, that I think was written in Perl. I also took ideas from Thomas Boutell (wusage) and Eric Katz (WebReport).”
Web analytics tools began by telling us how many hits we had on the site, but that doesn’t do much today to tell us what’s really happening with our sites. The tools went through many evolutions before they got to where we are today - simple metrics, a few KPIs and actionable information. I’ll touch a bit on this in the book; we’ll also cover implementation methods, advantages, limitations and deployment impact of web analytics tools.
The book is days away from having a completed 1st draft. I can’t wait to send the complete manuscript out to the reviewers!
