Webtrends - Reporting Site Usage and Other Stats? 28
gammoth asks: "My company has a successful web site which gets roughly 1,800,000 hits from 45,000 sessions a day. A few years ago, our web stats software, HitList, broke when we crossed it's capacity threshold (~1,000,000 hits). I replaced it with a tailored version of Webalizer supported by an array of perl scripts and a Suitespot server plugin. My reporting system runs with little intervention, managing log files from 4 hosts, and competently reports on hits, popular pages, referrers, etc. But it's not perfect and I'm the first to admit it doesn't provide the kind of info the marketing department would find really useful. I have plans of a comprehensive system using a DB and a report engine, but I've not had the time to implement it. (We're interested in info on marketing campaign success, path through site, etc). Meanwhile, marketing is tired of waiting and the otherwise exceptionally supportive IT management (truly) is considering contracting out some of our site usage reporting. Webtrends is being looked at seriously. I was wondering if any readers out there had had any experience with Webtrends or other software package or service provider. Are there any OS packages that provide features well beyond Webalizer?"
Hating WebTrends, and dealing with Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
WebTrends annoys me greatly, because it is poorly documented, has a sucky interface, and misleads naive users into thinking they are getting reports on "visitors" and "sessions" when in fact they are simply getting stats on a window of visits from an IP number.
Read this document Why web usage statistics are worse than meaningless [goldmark.org] and memorise it.
Also, remind your marketing folks that quantitative data from your logfiles can only be interpreted with qualitative data from interviews/focus groups/usability studies. If people stay for less time in your site tan before, is it because your design sucks, or because they found what they wanted and left quickly? Only qualitative research can tell you.
Whenever marketing people spot trend variations, they will ask you why. You will need to know the above in order to respond properly.
Re:NOT meaningless (Score:3, Insightful)
Cookies only work their magic if you have full control of the hosting environment; ie if you can set a unique cookie in the first place, and record it in the logs. (Yes, I know, you ought to be able to do this everywhere, but it's not a perfect world). In their absence, I don't know how you measure the effect of proxies in conflating IP numbers.
I think there's WebTrends, and WebTrends. The versions that I have seen (WebTrends Enterprise) did not operate in the manner you described - it was a product that you ran on your own boxes that did pure log file analysis. It did not have a server component that could "tag" a page, and WT themselves were not involved. The feature you describe is very neat - although whether it justifies WT's very high price tag is a good question.
I still feel that if there is a particular metric that is important to you, you are better off coding it yourself or using Analog.