RE: tools to measure our site statistics

From: James Santagata <jms_at_tribalnoise.com>
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 09:39:41 -0500 (CDT)

>GREG BRAYLOVSKY WROTE:
>>We are currently using WebTrends to measure our site
>>statistics. However, we have concerns that the numbers are
>>somewhat inaccurate and incomplete

TO WHICH TOM LEHMAN REPLIED:
>I echo your concern about WebTrends. Many of my clients use
>this popular tracking application, and almost all of them
>have one problem or another with the data they get back. In
>particular we have noted wide discrepancies between weekly,
>monthly and quarterly rollups. Some of this is a result of
>not being careful enough about specifying exactly the same
>parameters for each set of reports. But that doesn't appear
>to be the whole answer. One area of continuing concern is
>the way in which WebTrends determines session counts.

There are two other factors that can be skewing your
logfiles and the logfile reporting:

1) Session Counts: A session count is dependent on HOW a
user session is defined. If you change the definition, you
change the results. Since HTTP is a stateless protocol, the
server has no way of determing when a user has finished a
session (unless the user is somehow motivated or forced to
sign off) or has left the website (while clicks on an
external link can be tracked, direct URL inputs into
the browser cannot be tracked - assuming a std browser is
used and a cross network supercookie is not utilized).

Therefore, a user session is arbitrarily defined as some
period of time of user inactivity (20 minutes, etc.) based
on the server log. But even this is problematic. If the
session time is set too short, we lose out on tracking that
individual; if it is set too long we will run into the
problem of one person's session being combined with
another's session, since the 2nd user may have picked up the
previous user's IP address due to IP address recycling
(especially on services like AOL). It seems possible to use
some stochastic modeling techniques overtime to try to
improve on this definition.


2) Caching: Many ISPs and companies are beginning to
implement caching servers which hold frequently requested
documents/images locally. This reduces network traffic and
can increase performance for the user. It also can be very
beneficial for the destination site, since caching offloads
server and bandwidth traffic from your server to the
caching server.

The downside is that cached documents/images will not
normally be written into your server log files, since the
browser's request for a particular document will be
resolved, pointed and served by the cache server (under most
circumstances).

This is why it is important to apply some cache-busting
techniques such as using redirects, no-cache metatags or
generating a random value and concatenating it to an
embedded object, such as is commonly down on banner ads. It
can look like this: myad.gif?randomvaluehere

This will bust the cache. Once the cache is busted, the
destination server will return the gif and log that activity
into the log file. The value after the "?" will be evaluated
and then discarded by the webserver (or you can setup the
server to capture more data on the ad served).

   There are other strategies which can be employed when
developing a webpage that will allow one to the enjoy the
benefits of caching (faster response for user; resource
offloading for destination server), but still be able to
bust the cache in a precise manner to generate accurate
activity logs.

Best regards,

James Santagata
TribalNoise!
Internet Marketing Strategists
Sunnyvale, California

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Received on Wed Jun 16 1999 - 15:41:52 CDT