Futurequest STATS question (opinion)

[jefbea]

I guess I'm really looking for any OPINIONS out there:

I was wondering......... are our statistics pages (http://MYDOMAIN.com/stats) comparable (quality-wise) to a software program such as Webtrends Log Analyzer? If you were me, which would YOU prefer? Or is there even a different proggie out there that you like better than both?

TIA

Jeff

[Andilinks]

I tried this:
http://www.mach5.com/products/analyzer/index.php
for their 25 day trial and found the program more informative and their analysis more detailed by a small margin than the stats package provided by Futurequest. My traffic is quite low, and I am not deriving any revenue from my site so that did not justify the extra $100 or $200 for the Mach5 packages. I find the RENT-A-GURU stats adequate for my purposes.

If I were engaged in any commerce though or had some other important reason to analyze traffic to the site I would invest in the extra package.

Andi

You should read this recent post by Syneryder:

http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=75484#post75484

[Jeff]

are our statistics pages (http://MYDOMAIN.com/stats) comparable (quality-wise) to a software program such as Webtrends Log Analyzer?
No.

The http-analyze stats are great for bandwidth monitoring (and better than many other stats packages for counting the bytes) but http-analyze is not very good for tracking referrers, trends, paths through your site, pages, browser types and user configs, etc., etc. http-analyze is great for running the server and tracking costs, bandwidth, and getting the overall broad picture of how popular your site is, but others such as the full version of webtrends provide a much much more detailed and user friendly view for a webmaster trying to position a site to reach a particular audience or track directory listing effectiveness or streamline a site for longer visits, etc. But realize also that Webtrends is 10x more expensive and is quite a sizeable cost - too expensive for many sites.

[Syneryder]

I haven't tried Webtrends personally. From what I've heard it's extremely detailed, but very slow to generate and only creates static website reports.

I'm looking very seriously at Mach5 FastStats Analyzer Gold because of its interactive analysis capabilities. Its only downside is that it's utterly inept at geographical analysis (though I know a way that could be improved, I'll contact the authors and see if they'll implement it). Everything else about it is superb. Once you've tried FastStats' HyperTree View for tracking visitor paths through a website, you realise no static reports could ever match that.

I'm using it to filter out superfluous stats (http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12440) (ie filtering out specific HTTP error codes), track search engine keywords to specific sections and files on my site, and to determine return on investment from online ads and referring sites to my e-commerce site. $200 is a sizeable chunk of my revenue, but I think it will be worth it in the long run.

PS FQs stats have satisfied my needs for the first four years of my site, including 2 years of e-commerce.
PPS Cheers to Andi for suggesting Mach5 to me, once again you've come up with goods!

[Jeff]

As far as webtrends speed, that doesn't really bother me since it runs locally. When I tried the demo on all my sites it took between 2 and 15 minutes to run on a dual PIII 1 GHZ. And if I want a report at noon, with http://analyze set to cron daily I have to wait 12+ hours for an up to the minute report. Using webtrends that can be cut to around 20 minutes including download time! The nice thing about static reports is that you can archive them and use them for things such as marketing (quickly email a few pages to a potential advertiser since it's already in nicely formatted html)

Mach5 FastStats Analyzer looks pretty darn nice though. And at a fraction of the price of webtrends, even nicer! Thanks for pointing it out, as webtrends is too expensive for my needs right now.

[JoeRT]

I mentioned this in another thread...

Sawmill has done very good for what I needed. Very configurable to exactly what I want to see.

http://www.sawmill.net


-------------------------
Joe Torsitano
www.weatherforyou.com