All analytics packages attempt to show you how your Site Visitors and Site Users actually use your site. Where they come from, what they look at, how long they stay, what they’re searching for, etc. Some will be better suited than others for analyzing some particular areas of interest, user behaviors, etc.

Why not just use Google Analytics?

Google Analytics (set up instructions) will give you great information that b2evolution may not be able to give you.

However, b2evolution’s built-in Server Side Analytics can also give you great information that Google cannot give you; for example: activity from robots, crawlers/spiders, RSS readers, API calls, AJAX queries and service requests. Google Analytics also won’t let you see or identify spammers.

Both systems have an area of overlap and each has it’s own set of extra features unique to them.

Why did b2evolution develop its own Analytics solution?

b2evolution’s built in tracking system was developed at first to fight off comment spam and automated account creation spam. This required to track all incoming requests in order to analyze them (mostly in real time) to detect abuse.

Once this data was collected, it was pretty easy to add a presentation layer allowing the Site Admin to explore this data.

From there on we added graphs and additional bells & whistles with each new version…

What is special about b2evolution’s Server Side Analytics (SSA)?

• Track everything ! Google Analytics can only track page views from Visitors using a web browser with JavaScript enabled. b2evolution will track all page views:
  • Even if Javascript is turned off
  • RSS and Atom feed requests
  • robot, crawler and spider activity
  • spammer activity
  • API calls
  • AJAX requests
  • Incomplete page loads (even if the user aborts loading the page, the view is counted)
• Identify and block spammer activity. Spammers never load the JavaScript Analytics packages and stay under the radar. With Server Side Analytics you can see what they do, identify them and block them.
• Drill down to the AJAX request level! b2evolution’s SSA will let you drill down to the level where you can see each page a user looked at, chronologically, including each AJAX request he made by hovering over elements on a page. This level of detail is typically not available on External Analytics packages.
• Network speed: b2evolution doesn’t require an extra JavaScript to be loaded and executed. It saves network and client processing time (at the expense of server processing time – but the server side was needed for spam fighting anyways).
• Serving device specific content: the embedded system allows b2evolution to serve a different skin to web browsers, tablets and smartphones for example.
• Under development: b2evolution will be able to perform highly efficient A/B testing and (combined with Goal tracking) will be able to automatically select the best presentation for specific user segments.