Thought I might share a neat Awstats hack of mine that I use to read my referer data better. This simple hack/addon is nothing more than a bit of regex. It takes your search traffic data and puts it into separate Yahoo, MSN, and Google tables. It also grabs your traffic from Digg.com and puts them into a nice table organized by referring page.
ScreenShot (Click To Enlarge)
Installation
All you got to do is append the code below into your sites’ conf file. Your conf file on a standard Cpanel setup is usually located in the /tmp/awstats/awstats.mydomain.conf folder below your root in the ftp. Place the code at the bottom, save, and reupload. Be sure to make a backup of your previous conf file even though this should be pretty foolproof.
If you got any requests for additions to this hack drop a comment and let me know.
thanks. another great post. ill try this later. bookmarked..
*sorry had to edit links out*
Bonus For The People Who Read The Comments
Tracks referals from Google Images
Just add this below the others in the conf file.
Cool Eli. Thanks for that!
Cheers Eli, never paid enough attention to realise you could do this sort of thing with awstats!
This is brilliant.
You, sir, are both a scholar and a gentleman!
Does not work for me on a very busy site with about 2500 unique visitors per day. However works on a site with less traffic. Anyway - thanks for sharing.
Christoph
It doesn’t matter if you receive 100 people per day or 300 trillion people a day. This is still useful.
This line here
MaxNbOfExtra5=10
That line determines how many results to show.. (like this one is top 10)
This is top 5
MaxNbOfExtra5=5
Its not going to show you every single one that came thru..
I think your fulla shit cracker. Why don’t you enlighten us to all the ways you make all of this money online rather than slamming other folks?
Yeah, it’s just too easy to say things like “I made 56million bucks yesterday, and this site is full of shit.”
Who are u Cracker? Someone who doesn’t implement anything from here. You are wasting your time here, and time is money, so you are funny:)
It was a good tip Eli, Thanks.
I deleted joe crackers comment. Incase you were curious he said the usual “This sucks you should spam myspace.” haha kind of like trying to sell cookies to the other girlscouts wouldn’t ya say? He also said he makes $xxx for his 100k visitors/day which means he’s officially got the lowest payouts and conversions in all of myspace spam history.
Getting boring so he’s banned from commenting.
sounds good
my AWSTATS conf file keeps reverting back to its original state a day after I add the code.
Anyone know why?
Are you on a cpanel setup?
Cpanel runs a cron that rebuilds all those config files daily.
The default awstats config file for cpanel is located at
/usr/local/cpanel/etc/awstats.conf
It would require root permissions to edit that file.
If your on shared hosting you’d have to manually upload your config file each time… Pain in butt…
Or make a cronjob that did it for you daily =)
Here’s the perl code for the cronjob. Don’t forget to put your perl headers at the top #!/usr/bin/perl or whatever.
$path_to_conf = '/home/mydomain/tmp/awstats/awstats.mydomain.conf';
$append_code = qq~
ExtraSectionName1=”Google Search Keywords/Phrases”
ExtraSectionCodeFilter1=”200 304″
ExtraSectionCondition1=”REFERER,^http:\/\/www\.google\.[^/]+\/search\?.*q=.*$”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnTitle1=”Search Phrases”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnValues1=”REFERER,[?&]q= *([^& ][^&]*[^& +])[ +]*(&.*)?$”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnFormat1=”%s”
ExtraSectionStatTypes1=PHBL
ExtraSectionAddSumRow1=1
MaxNbOfExtra1=10
MinHitExtra1=1
ExtraSectionName2=”Yahoo! Search Keywords/Phrases”
ExtraSectionCodeFilter2=”200 304″
ExtraSectionCondition2=”REFERER,^http:\/\/(\w*\.)*search\.yahoo\.[^/]+\/.*$”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnTitle2=”Search Phrases”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnValues2=”REFERER,[?&]p= *([^& ][^&]*[^& +])[ +]*(&.*)?$”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnFormat2=”%s”
ExtraSectionStatTypes2=PHBL
ExtraSectionAddSumRow2=1
MaxNbOfExtra2=10
MinHitExtra2=1
ExtraSectionName3=”Live Search - MSN Search Keywords/Phrases”
ExtraSectionCodeFilter3=”200 304″
ExtraSectionCondition3=”REFERER,^http:\/\/search\.(msn\.[^/]+|live\.com)\/.*$”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnTitle3=”Search Phrases”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnValues3=”REFERER,[?&]q= *([^& ][^&]*[^& +])[ +]*(&.*)?$”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnFormat3=”%s”
ExtraSectionStatTypes3=PHBL
ExtraSectionAddSumRow3=1
MaxNbOfExtra3=10
MinHitExtra3=1
ExtraSectionName4=”Digg.com Visitors”
ExtraSectionCodeFilter4=”200 304″
ExtraSectionCondition4=”REFERER,^http:\/\/(\w*\.)*digg\.[^/]+\/.*$”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnTitle4=”Digg Referers”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnValues4=”REFERER”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnFormat4=”%s”
ExtraSectionStatTypes4=PHBL
ExtraSectionAddSumRow4=1
MaxNbOfExtra4=10
MinHitExtra4=1
ExtraSectionName5=”Google Image Keyphrases”
ExtraSectionCodeFilter5=”200 304″
ExtraSectionCondition5=”REFERER,^http:\/\/images\.google\.”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnTitle5=”Keyphrases”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnValues5=”REFERER,^.*q\%3D(([^\%]|\%[^2]|\%2[^6])*)\%26.*$”
ExtraSectionFirstColumnFormat5=”%s”
ExtraSectionStatTypes5=PHL
ExtraSectionAddSumRow5=1
MaxNbOfExtra5=10
MinHitExtra5=1
~;
open(OUTF,”>>$path_to_conf”);
print OUTF “\n\n$append_code”;
close(OUTF);
Than just set it to update every night immediately after your awstats automatically updates(about 12:30am).
Eli, your on vacation.. Most people don’t troll around forums and lurk on blogs during vacation..
go camping, get drunk, goto the dairy queen and get a flameburger, or stop by here and pickup some money.
-rob
I heart Blue Hat SEO
My awstats hacking consists of simple wget referer spam:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=Q0s&q=site%3Aedu+OR+site%3Agov+%22Links+from+an+external+page+%28other+web+sites+except+search+engines%29%22&btnG=Search
Holy shit!
nice comment!
Notice that the first result is a pr6
Hi Eli and GlobalwarmingAwareness..
I know you posted these comments about 6 months ago, but I’ve just found your blog and I am thoroughly enjoying it..
WRT to Awstats idea, what do you guys see as the best way to take advantage of this AWSTATS info you found in Google.
Initially I thought of using something like running a simple script that would call the root site with the HTTP_REFERER tag containing the site I want to promote, but is this the best way to tackle it..
Hopeing you can help
bruce
Awesome post. This will help a lot. I added your blog to my blogroll. This place is great.
Also there’s other packages that can be targeted, analog and webalizer come to mind. Bunch more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_log_analysis_software#Popular_log_analyzers
You could also try stuffing the stats page with keywords through a google search referer. I’m not sure, but it may be possible to use keywords like keyword
Very useful hacks, thanks a lot, I already implemented them.
I was trying to modify the hacks to make it possible to track specific referrals but my hacking knowledge is rather limited, hence I didn’t succeed.
Is there a standard hack where one just can replace the url in order to track from which pages on a domain visitors are coming. That would absolutely great.
Hi Eli,
You forgot to say that you copied these great hacks from http://www.internetofficer.com/awstats/keywords-by-search-engine/
David
Actually, you forgot to give me credit
Your post date: Feb. 19th 2007
Mine: Jan. 19th 2007
:(
Credit where credit is due, would be I guess the Awstats documentation where most of this info is.
No worries though as long as the info gets out there and helps people, I’ll keep your link up anyway because you have a few useful comments in that post that I think everyone here should read. BTW my compliments on your blog I’ll add it to my reader and maybe add it to the blogroll here as well.
Nice Stuff!
Loads of different hacks and mods here to
sorry that didnt work here > http://computech-pcs.co.uk
cron jobs, php coding, mysql its all too much to take in!
AWstats is really useful though and i’m sure lots of people find this post useful too.
Interesting. So much hacking. It must be human nature to want to hack anything and everything
Cool. Great tip Eli
Error: The number of values found for extra section 5 has grown too large.
And I was only looking at a daily report! It would have been about 7000 uniques, 150,000 page views by this time of day. My awstats never had any trouble before the modification.
I was looking forward to this mod, it looked very promising.