Statistics: tracking referrers, page hits, etc.

The statistics module keeps track of numerous statistics of site usage. It counts how many times, and from where each of your posts is viewed. The statistics module can be used to learn many useful things about how users are interacting with each other and with your site.

Statistics module features

• Logs show statistics for how many times the site and specific content on the site has been accessed.
• Referrers tells you from where visitors came from (referrer URL).
• Top pages shows you what's hot, what is the most popular content on your site.
• Top visitors shows you the most active visitors for your site and allows you to ban abusive visitors.
• Recent hits displays information about the latest activity on the site.
• Node count displays the number of times a node has been accessed in the node's link section next to # comments.

Configuring the statistics module at Administer >> Logs >> Access log settings

• Enable access log allows you to turn the access log on and off. This log is used to store data about every page accessed, such as the remote host's IP address, where they came from (referrer), what node they've viewed, and their user name. Enabling the log adds one database call per page displayed by Drupal.
• Discard access logs older than allows you to configure how long an access log entry is saved, after which time it is deleted from the database table. To use this you need to run cron.php
• Enabling Count content views allows you to turn on and off the node-counting functionality of this module. If it is turned on, an extra database query is added for each node displayed, which increments a counter.

Permissions at Administer >> User management >> Access control

• access statistics allows users within a role to view the statistics logs.
• view post access counter allows users within a role to view the count results from the Count content views setting.

You can

• administer statistics administer >> settings >> statistics for Drupal 4.7 or Administer >> Logs >> Access log settings for Drupal 5.x.
• access statistics logs Administer >> Logs.
• view recent hits Administer >> Logs >> Recent hits.