Peter Schoenster wrote:
> On 10 May 98 at 20:37, Matthew Soffen wrote:
>
> > At 07:34 PM 5/10/98 -0400, you wrote:
> > >At 11:57 PM 5/7/1998 +0000, Peter J. Schoenster so eloquently stated:
>
> > >>BTW, I tried the latest version of Webtrends and I think it is very
> > >>good. Opera has been crashing on my NT ( I think IE realizes it has
> > >>competition and is forcing Opera to crash:)). Also, I very much like
> > >>Web Position but the html it generates is terrible.
> >
> > Have you ever used Analog for performing web site hit analysis ? It
> > is freeware and fairly fast too.
> >
> > It is available from this url:
> > http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/analog/
>
> I have but not lately. I think Webtrends presents a very
> professional/corporate type of report that most companies like.
I'm in agreement here. I use WebTrends and find it to be very comprehensive
and practical. I especially like the differentiation between "hits" and
"user sessions", even though it is subject to some inaccuracy, due to being
based on a "session length" default such as 20 minutes or 30 minutes.
I looked at Analog and it looked like it was missing quite a few of the
reports that WebTrends creates. Particularly the search engine keyword
analysis.
> I wrote my own analysis which tells me where people are coming from
> and which pages are most accessed. I can track which sites send the
> most visitors to my site. I am surprised that so few people find
> this interesting; I find it fascinating. Can be seen here:
>
http://www.rede.com/stats/top50.html
I, too, find this most interesting and can't figure out why more log
analysis tools don't really beef up on this feature. To me it's one of the
most interesting and useful details. You can actually act on the facts,
instead of just going "oh, wow, 44% MSIE, huh, still can't use DHTML". You
can use these facts to build traffic to your site. You can analyze who is
finding your site of enough interest to click to, and, by going to the page
the link was on, you can find out more about the interests of your current
and potential audience.
I mentioned keyword/search engine analysis. By analyzing your logs to see
what search engines and what keywords led people to your site you can
determine not only the popular engines and keywords for specific engines,
but you can determine where you are lacking in your search engine tactics.
Let's say that the word "butter" at Yahoo is leading to your site 500 times
a week, but only 25 times a week from Excite...you can adjust your strategy
accordingly. Maybe boost up the word butter in Excite, or other engines.
Also, by looking at keyword analysis you can determine what words are not
working or what words are sorely lacking. For example, let's say that I own
a dairy. I know that the word 'milk' is a word I would want users to enter
in a search engine to end up at my site. But I look at my keyword/search
engine analysis and see that there is no mention of the word 'milk' anywhere
to be found. I can now set out to get my site to show up when people search
for keyword 'milk', and so on. Could be the word 'cheese' or 'brie', or
whatever. The keyword log analysis shows you what is working and you can
infer from that what is not working.
<snip>
>But my job now will be to track websites and work on getting them
>into the top ten for the specific keyword/phrases that the client and
>our reps decide on (I've gotten a job for an ad agency).
Good luck. I think your CGI skills will probably bear some good fruit on
that kind of a project. Of course I'll expect you to stick all the scripts
on your free CGI site! ;)
Jack
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