It is now mostly unusable for web analytics. So many scrapers are pretending to be browsers. On my site, there is a factor 10 with what I consider an honest view of human visitors.
If you're using it to serve the marketing team, then yeah. We use it more for server performance and metrics that cookie-cutter JS analytics tools can't really provide.
btw, JS-based analytics are no longer as accurate for identifying "real humans" as they used to be. bots have gotten much better at behaving like a person behind a keyboard, so it's increasingly easy for them to make your analytics tool think they're a real user
This is not untrue, but I suppose that if you don't prevent bots from accessing your website, they won't try to use the more advanced scrapers running JS and won't trigger your analytics.
When customers ask me for visitor metrics I tend to explain that it doesn't matter anymore before I show them them the highly inflated absolutely unrealistic numbers.
I've revived AWFFull for static log analysis, just like in the good old webalizer days :-). Link to the report is in my bio, sorry, I can't post links here for now.
What I'm seeing matches the observations of the other commenters here exactly: most of the "users" are bots harvesting pages and PDFs. My solution for getting at the real users is GoatCounter.
12 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 17.3 ms ] threadbtw, JS-based analytics are no longer as accurate for identifying "real humans" as they used to be. bots have gotten much better at behaving like a person behind a keyboard, so it's increasingly easy for them to make your analytics tool think they're a real user
https://goaccess.io/man#custom-log
What I'm seeing matches the observations of the other commenters here exactly: most of the "users" are bots harvesting pages and PDFs. My solution for getting at the real users is GoatCounter.
Again, if I remember correctly, it was able to make reports for AWS Cloudfront logs, which was actually useful.
Hmm, I think you might be mixing things up, goaccess is written in C and probably not written as an alternative to lnav.