Traffic Analysis for Busy Sites
By Ernest Black
Extensive and accurate Web traffic reports are essential for e-business success, and the market offers several excellent products from which to choose. NetGenesis NetAnalysis (www.netgenesis.com), Macromedia
Aria (www.macromedia.com), and LiveStats (www.statisticsserver.com) are some available options, but I've spent a lot of time working with WebTrends Enterprise, and I was interested in what the new release offered.
Overview
WebTrends Enterprise Suite 5.0 is a
graphical Web metrics analysis toolkit that focuses on five areas: Web traffic analysis, link analysis, proxy analysis, alerting and monitoring, and streaming media. The first two areas are important for obvious reasons: You want to know who's visiting your site, where they're coming from, which keywords they were interested in, which pages they visited, how long they stayed, how many pages they viewed, which browsers they used, and so on.
Likewise, you want to know which links on your site are broken, frustrating visitors who may leave and never return. More specifically, you want to know which search engines are driving traffic to your site so that you can optimize for better search results or decide whether to invest in an expensive banner ad campaign.
