A good, midrange visitor statistics solution can offer a company substantial information about its site’s visitors and can be quite affordable, as well as easy to implement. Traffic analysis pulls significant pieces of customer data from a site’s traffic logs and converts them into readable reports that can tell you, for example, who have visited the site, what their location is, how many pages they visited, and how long they stayed at your site.

With a traffic analysis solution you may find, for example, that you have been spending 80 percent of your development resources on a portion of the site that only 5 percent of users visit. That kind of information can fuel powerful business decisions, from redesigning the Website to re-evaluating advertisement effectiveness.

The web server statistics market is huge; it encompasses products that offer a variety of capabilities, running the gamut from low-end freeware to high-end solutions costing thousands of dollars. Companies testing the waters may find such variety intimidating. For this Test Center Comparison, we looked at solutions well-suited to the needs of a midsize company of about 400 employees, with a Web site generating an average of 600,000 hits per day (for our tests, we used an 80MB log file, which translated to this average number of hits).

We focused on affordable, easy-to-use products offering both traffic and link analysis, determining that this combination of capabilities provides the most comprehensive picture of Web site activity. We tested three traffic analysis solutions: WebTrends’ WebTrends Professional Suite, Version 3.0; Marketwave’s Hit List
Professional, Version 4.0 (bundled with Linkbot Pro, Version 3.6); and WebManage Technologies’ NetIntellect, Version 3.0 (also bundled with Linkbot Pro, Version 3.6).

The Options

* Hit List Professional (bundled with Linkbot Pro 3.6)
* NetIntellect 3.0 (bundled with Linkbot Pro 3.6)
* WebTrends Professional Suite 3.0

The Answer

WebTrends provided more in-depth analysis and extensive management capabilities than either of its competitors. But the Marketwave and WebManage solutions are still good bets if your primary focus is general analysis.