Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Webtrends - analysing site traffic

Dirk Lotze (dlmusik_at_t-online.de)
Wed, 25 Mar 1998 14:14:59 -0100

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I had a go at Virtual WebTrends some time ago (several other tools,
too - but I forgot their names). My experience:

- It is extremely slow and a resource killer (considering what it
does)
- It has far too few options for configuration
- The graphics look good. In some places where you would expect a
total on the y-axis you will find percent of maximum, which can be
irritating.
- The interpretation suggested by the reports is very questionable.
Apart from what I wrote about in that cache-busting thread, there are
other doubtful aproaches: It uses offline databases to determine the
geographic location of a requesting server. It uses an offline
database for recognising index robots. This information was already
outdated at the time I downloaded the package. It does not give you
information on the accuracy of the provided percentages (based on the
size of the sample) as a statistics tool should.

For sound log file analysis I recommend analog
(http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/analog/) by Stephen R. E.
Turner. It is very fast, has a lot of options for customizing reports
and doesn't try to mislead you into reading from your log files which
is not in them. The HTML-Reports can be read with any browser
(graphics or text). It has a forms interface in case you want to
run it from a web page. There is the possibility to do preformatted
reports for later processing with a spread sheet or an external
statistics package. It is free.

Obviously a tool like analog can't give you reports to impress your
customers with.

Many greetings
Dirk Lotze

---
Dirk Lotze Musikmanagement
http://www.DLmusik.nvo.com/


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