RE: tools to measure our site statistics

From: John Charlesworth <jcharlesworth_at_bellacoola.com>
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 1999 21:02:11 -0500 (CDT)

James Santagata wrote:
>There are two other factors that can be skewing your
>logfiles and the logfile reporting:
>
>1) Session Counts
>2) Caching

His made several good points on how session count
definitions can skew traffic analysis, but these were
probably not the cause of Tom Lehman's problems (wide
discrepancies between weekly, monthly and quarterly
rollups). The same session timeout settings would have been
in effect for all the reports.

WebTrends allows you to specify the number of minutes of
inactivity to allow before considering a session terminated
(factory set to the "industry standard" (i.e. FAST) of 30
minutes). As long as you don't change this setting, you
should expect consistency over varying time intervals.


With regards to caching, our measurements on our own site
<http://www.bellacoola.com> show that browser-caching
affects accuracy much more than ISP/Corporate caching.

During the 5 month test interval, our "traditional" server
logs under-counted true impressions by 11 to 66% (depending
on the page). This largest determinant was the placement
of the pages on the "virtual conveyor belt" through our
site.

Pages at "navigational hubs" had higher under-counting, due
to the higher number of people returning to these hubs via
their browser's Back Button.

If we had we been running advertising banners on these pages
(we weren't), we would have been undercharging by 11 to
66%.

For those of you who are interested in the specifics of
counting true impressions on your site, feel free to
contact me at <mailto:jcharlesworth_at_bellacoola.com>.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,
.../j

---------------- <mailto:jcharlesworth_at_bellacoola.com> ----------------
John Charlesworth, President BellaCoola Software Corporation
          Do you know which promotions are *really* working??
       Sign up for BellaCoola's all-in-one web tracking service!
Complete cache-corrected measurement of email, banners, and page-views.
         Everything you need to track marketing effectiveness.
-------------------- <http://www.bellacoola.com/?prw3> ------------------

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Received on Sun Jun 27 1999 - 05:25:07 CDT