26 replies to this topic

[Anthony]

I am currently in need of an economical (under $1,000) web log statistical analyzer that is capable of developing reports pertaining to the following information:

Users domain address
Tracking a user by their specific domain address - where they go and who referred them (ie search engine, link partner, etc) and which keywords they used to reach our site

Since my company sells a specialized service (thus no online sells), the key thing is that I be able to track the user's habits by their domain address and the keywords they used. We need to be able to identify potential clients so that we can send them targeted marketing information.

I have already evaluated clicktracks (not sure if provides needed information based off of trial version) and webtrends (too expensive).

Therefor, what statistical web site log analyzer programs do you recommend? Thank you for your help.


Moved to Statistics and Tracking ROI forum. - Jill

Edited by Jill, 09 September 2003 - 06:01 PM.

[Vertster]

Hi Anthony-

Could you be a little more specific in your question...

Tracking a user by their specific domain address

What do you mean by this? The site that they came from or, their ISP domain/IP address?

I am surprised you did not find clicktracks adequate for what you are trying to do. It is probably the best package currently available for doing this kind of analysis, unless you get into the really expensive ones.

We need to be able to identify potential clients so that we can send them targeted marketing information.

There is no way that you will be able to identify them, unless they contact you through your website. This being the case, it sounds like your site should be designed to generate leads. Do you have a contact link on all the relevant pages? How about your phone number?

Or are you talking about dynamically creating your site based on what keywords/entry point they came to your site from? That is an admirable strategy, but it is gonna take a lot more than a log analyzer- you will have to trap the referrer string, strip out the keywords, analyze it, use a cookie or session var, and build your content dynamically. Its a somewhat sophisticated backend programming process...

[Matt B]

You may want to look at DeepMetrix. (www.deepmetrix.com) I am evaluating their product right now for a couple of clients and maybe for our own use. It has most of the features that you are looking for and the price seems to be very competitive.

[Vertster]

Matt-

I have actually used Deepmetrix quite extensively. One of our hosting partners used it for quite a while. About the only good thing I remember about it is that it creates a lot of pretty pictures...

I won't say too much about it though, cause that was 6-8 months ago, and they may have worked out some of the problems. The host I was with had problems with their enterprise version, and eventually dumped it because there were so many complaints from end users.

[TheGreatDane]

Anthony
depending on whether you are looking for an application to be installed on your workstation or on the server, you might want to have a look at awstats (if the latter is the situation). It's a perl script, it's free, and it gives you - as far as I can see - what you are looking for (including referrers, uses keywords etc.). It can be customized to a very high degree as well.

Vertster is right though, in saying that you cannot identify the visitors as such. Sometimes you can track the company name, but basically every user on the internet is anonymous.

[digitalpoint]

WebTrends is what we use, and are very happy with it...

- Shawn

[Matt B]

Thanks, Verster - I'll keep that in mind.

I am mainly looking at their providor solution for our hosting clients. We need something that can be customized for different "types" of clients and their stats needs. Their price was what immediately attracted me to this extensive a provider product.

[projectphp]

http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/ Webalyzer is pretty darned good, and the cost == FREE. Can't beat that!!

[Matt B]

Yes - I've seen webalizer. I'm just not too impressed with what I've seen. The last version I saw wasn't able to pull spider visits out of regular "people" visits - it combined everything into one visitor session.

[Scottie]

AWStats is free too- and much more detailed.

I'm not a fan of Webalizer, either although it seems to the default stats software installed with every host I work with.

[cline]

One of my clients has a similar problem. They developed a tagging system to follow individual users through the site. The most salient use of the information is that every lead generated by the system shows where the user entered from and exactly what pages they visited. I would expect that the system could be modified to capture the user's IP address, too. It just wasn't of interest to us.

I could hook you up with the IT consultant who developed the system for us, if you're interested.

[meta]

What do you mean by "We need to be able to identify potential clients so that we can send them targeted marketing information."? What are you actually trying to accomplish?

[projectphp]

Cline, I'd be hessitant about doing that if I were you. Individual data like that is a privacy concern, IMHO. It is better to use stats only for trends and general ROI, rather than to track to individual users. However, if you do go to that level, maybe you should put that iun your privacy policy.

[meta]

It is not an uncommon business practice to track visitor referrals and movement within a site. It's not easy to do well, but it's done. It's also reasonable. You are only using information that users give freely to you by requesting pages. If the information is shared, then there is a privacy issue, but cline has not mentioned any sharing.

[Matt B]

I think what php was referring to was the practice of looking up IP's of visitors to the site and then contacting the company simply based on their presence on the website, rather than waiting for them to fill out a info form or ask to be contacted.
Once a visitor has contacted you or ordered a product, then you can email or send info without running into privacy issues.

Is that what you were referring to, php?