In general, I find Smarter Stats much more helpful than Live Stats, except for one area - "checking who is online". The ability to check who is online (even though the information is "delayed") is something that I find useful for gauging when to push a small update to my site. Live Stats let's you see how much traffic is on, where they come from and what they are doing. The same information is not provided by Smarter Stats who shows partial information about the last one or two users on the site. Usually this information is terribly dated and of little value.

Is Smarter Stats planning on enhancing their "who is online" functionality?

At presesnt, I rely on both Smarter Stats and Live Stats but suspect that Live Stats will soon go away. Can anyone confirm if both will continue to be available or when Live Stats will cease to be available?

Thanks,
Mike

Mike,

Thanks for the feedback on SmarterStats. One of the nicest things about this program and the company that develops it, SmarterTools, is that they are open to suggestions for way to improve their product. You can go to their forums, http://forums.smartertools.com/ and under SmarterStats there is a forum called Feature Requests. This is where people can post features they would like to see added in future releases. The feature you are referring to is a popular one so I am sure that someone has requested it and they are reviewing it, but it doesnt hurt to add another post

As for Livestats we are no longer working with DeepMetrix to support this product. What this means is that we are no longer adding customers to the servers, nor will we be upgrading our current servers as new updates and versions come out. The Livestats servers are currently still running. The eventual plan is to stop the collection process and keep the servers running for historic information and then phase them out completely. This probably wont start happening for a number of months so you will still be able to check the who's on report. Hopefully when we are ready to begin this process Smarterstats will have a similar feature.

Alan:

I took you tip and joined the SmarterStats forum the day you mentioned it. I read through their archive and found that a similar question had been raised in 2003 and the response (at the time) was that something might be added to a future upgrade. On December 29th, I asked if it was possible that addtional functionality would be added to the "who is online report" and placed the request in the Request for upgrades folder in the SmarterStats section of the SmarterTools Forums. No response yet in over a month - does not look good. I left a follow-up today and will let you know if there is any "news". So, for now, I have to depend on "live stats" for any information.

Live Stats (for all its other problems) has turned out to be a blessing. In discussing an issue with Google recently, a CSR told me that the problem I was discussing was caused because they likely had not spidered my site - I replied that two urls from google had visited my site the previous day and had each been on the site for 6 hours - we quickly moved to something more relevant to my question.
Thanks

Why would it be necessary to know who's on your site at that moment?

Josh:

In general, I am not interested in knowing who is on - although sometimes it is useful in judging responses to marketing and advertising campaigns.

I am more interested in getting a good handle on how many users are online at any time so I can push changes to the site without causing too much difficulty for my users. We receive visitors from every continent, so time zone management and site changes are a consideration for us.

We also use some of the stats that are reported in a "forensics" approach to understanding errors. We keep a close on on "bad pages" and often find that these errors are from sources that have scrambled a URL. Sometimes we are able to find out who by comparing the error counts with who is on in order to remediate the problem.

Finally, in a competitive business like ours, it is useful to know when and for how long competitors are at your site.

It may well be that these reasons are of no concern for other users but I find the current traffic section of Smarter Stats inferior to Live Stats and was looking to find out whether Smarter Stats was planning to augment this feature in the future.

Mike

Mike,

I was just asking out of curiosity. I see soooooooo many people that act like stats are the come all end all of everything revolving around there site. What it amounts to is that this is just a visual affirmation that Yes, they are getting traffic, and apparently alot of people need that for their own piece of mind.

I've seen people say that one stats package is better than the other because this one counts more visits, or this one is better because the interface is flashier... and I've even had people tell me that it's important to know who's online at that very moment because "this is a large and important business"... whatever kind of reason that is lol.

Stats are just an analytical tool to help measure activity on your website whether it be entrance, exit, length of visit, etc. They are important, but I guess I just don't see why some people believe them to be more important than they're really meant to be.

Thanks for clarifying tho, because like I said, I was just curious.

And on a side note... if it's that important... you could always count the number of active sessions on your website. Are you a Linux or Windows user, and what technology are you using on the site?

I can let you know that a Who's onlie isn't planned in the near future for SmarterStats. It could be available in the next few revisions, but it has not been an overwhelming request. I can understand that seeing there are actually people on your site is nice, however in reality, the way that LiveStats worked, those values were usually 10-15 minutes behind, after we put a few hundred sites on the server (a small fraction of the number LiveStats promises their software will support). You also have the option of running reports on Visitors, broken down by the hour of day, to let you view a more accurate average of traffic for the various hours of the day. After all, statistics are more representative given a larger sample set

LiveStats will probably be discontinued in the next couple of months, we have all of our servers running SmarterStats at this point, with a few months of data at this point.

It's been a change to move from LiveStats to SmarterStats, we here feel that it was a positive change. While SmarterStats isn't as finished and glossy as LiveStats and lacks a Who's on meter, it is reliable, updating at least every 15 minutes and being available constantly. There is no more having to reimport all of your log files and waiting 24-48 hours to see if it really worked (if you've experienced this, you know the frustration), instead you're statistics are just there!

I hope this answers your questions and gives you a little more background on the issues.

Thanks,
Ryan Leeson
Technical Support Specialist