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Webtrends - Reporting Site Usage and Other Stats?

Posted by Cliff on from the how-well-does-it-work dept.

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?"

1 of 28 comments (clear)

  1. Hating WebTrends, and dealing with Marketing by judd · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I much prefer less flashy but more capable tools such as Analog (http://www.analog.cx).

    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 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.