Are there any web log analyzers that produce something like Visitors Flow?

Question

We currently run AWStats and Google Analytics. I've recently looked into several other options including Piwik, Open Web Analytics, and Webalizer.

One thing that I'd like to track, and haven't found in anything (GA's Visitors Flow is closest) is statistics on referrers. That is:

1. For a page view, the page that linked to it
2. For static files (images, css, js) the page that called them

Visitors Flow gives something of this, but:

• It doesn't handle service URLs
• It doesn't handle static files (we have a lot of these)
• It's very sparse (only gives the top few routes into or out of a page)
• It's not integrated with any other pieces (eg. I can't easily drill down into a path in Visitors Flow to see a breakdown of pages within that path)

Are there any tools (preferably log-based) that can provide this information?

Answer 1

Like Anagio specified, you can create custom reports in google to analyze referrer traffic.

You need to analyze your server logs to get hits on css files and javascript files since GA tracker does not run on those. You can also use apache hooks, custom api's and various server software to track and analyse.

Using flow analysis on a css file doesn't make much sense since it likely will be only two stages: referrer hitting the css.

Hosted Log analysis

• http://papertrailapp.com/
• http://www.loggly.com/
• http://www.splunk.com/product (downloadable and cloud hosted available)

In addition to Piwik, Open Web Analytics, and Webalizer you can check out:

• https://mixpanel.com/
• http://www.kissmetrics.com/

It is also important to note that HTTP Referer is not reliable, can be blocked, modified by client. Some corporations, firewalls, routers and security suites block it.

Answer 2

Why would you need to track your CSS and JS files? If it's hot linking you're worried about there are other ways to monitor that.

In Analytics you can create custom reports to see referring sites that generated traffic to your pages and drill down.