StatEye Introduction

StatEye Website Statistics

What is StatEye?

StatEye is an open source software package to measure and analyze human website traffic.

Introduction

The development of StatEye started in 1998, when I was testing a way to measure website traffic as correctly as possible and installed a test prototype on my personal website. Since then the software continued to be developed and I even installed it on a few web stores for whom I did some work. Consequently the software became more geared to commercial web stores.

At the time I found that the available commercial alternatives had flaws in particular that of not separating measurement and analysis properly. Although they generally provided good looking graphics I disagreed with their business premise that placed appearance over content.

I also found hosted off-site alternatives unpleasing as the data is being kept somewhere else, and that data can reveal a lot about your business and your customers. Some of these services actually sell data, including data aggregated from your site (such as used search terms), to your competitors.

In 2004 I figured that it was a waste not to share my work with others and decided to make the software available for free under an open source license.

Features

StatEye has many features. The main features are:

Separation between logging of pageviews and analysis of data, so as to:
- Minimize impact on visitors.
- Allow for multiple analysis or re-analysis of data when desired.
Advanced referrer analysis:
- Search term analysis for many search engines (including Google Images and Google Groups).
- Determining which referrers lead to sales.
Sales path tracking.
Unique visitor detection.
Browser and OS analysis.
Lots of options and tweaks possible including:
- Tracking of on site searches.
- Subsite reporting.
- Filtering out your own pageviews.
Easy setup script, that should detect your settings automatically.

How it works

It is actually a simple two step approach. First measure pageviews and log the collected information then run a nightly script to analyze the log.

The information collected, consist of things such as:

IP number of visitor.
Page that was visited.
Referrer page.
User agent.
A timestamp.
Presence of certain cookies.

During the nightly run this information is used to extract such thing as:

The country of origin of visitors.
The number of pages visited and number of distinct visitors.
The pages that were visited first and last.
A list of websites that sent the most traffic your way.
The search terms used on search engines like Google.
The browsers and operating systems used by visitors.
The number of potential sales that were made on your site.
Searches performed through your own website.

The results are mailed to you every night and every month. There is no graphical user interface. Because everybody is different and wants to focus on their own details no preselection of data is made and the report is easily loaded into a spreadsheet (as a tab-delimited file), where you can make all the graphs that you want.

System requirements

In order to install StatEye, you need to be able to execute CGI scripts on your website. FTP and telnet (or sftp and ssh) access are necessary to install the software. A crontab is required to send the daily and monthly reports.

StatEye has been developed to run on Linux operating systems, using Perl 5.6, the GNU C-compiler (gcc), GNU make (gmake), and Bash. Although past versions have been compiled with other C-compilers, ran under other shells than Bash and on other UNIX operating systems I cannot vouch that it still does.

StatEye has also been installed successfully on FreeBSD using gcc, gmake and bash.

Any feedback, suggestions and fixes that would enhance portability will be most welcome.

Download and Install

It is quick to download and easy to install on your server:

Download the latest release from the download page, then follow the instructions on the setup page.