Visitor Marketing Made Easy

When evaluating each of the iis log statistics solutions, the companies paid particularly close attention to link analysis, log analysis, and performance, all of which give Web administrators the information that is essential for maximizing a site’s effectiveness. Link analysis can help you find out which links are the most popular, the least used, or broken. A site with many broken links discourages visitors from accessing it, while a site that has many unused links indicates the need for a redesign. You might be able to get this information through log analysis, if you watch the log file closely, but it is much easier to simply point a tool at your Web site that will ferret out those broken links before your visitors find them.

In-depth traffic log analysis can be the key to developing a clear Web strategy. Log analysis reveals demographic data about your visitors: From what location are they accessing the site? How long do they linger over each page? What types of organizations are attracted to your site? It can also help you track referrals, which can be handy not just for determining who is sending traffic to your site, but also for determining how traffic works within the site. How do people get around? What’s the most common or popular path, and can you improve the user interface on that path? Further, log analysis can tell you how well your site is handling traffic. It is critical to pinpoint your site’s peak hours and days and determine the standard deviation if you want your site to handle demand without turning people away.

Of course, proper demographic data goes far beyond log files and visitor marketing, and legitimate privacy concerns limit what data can and should be collected. Nevertheless, there’s a healthy middle ground between not knowing your customers at all and invading their privacy and traffic analysis occupies that space.

Anytime a program needs to analyze a large amount of data, particularly when data is continuously rolling in, performance becomes a huge issue. A few years ago, it was not uncommon for popular log analysis tools to take as long as 12 hours to analyze a busy site’s hourly log, a process too slow to be terribly useful. Today, analysis packages and their host machines are faster, though performance remains a problem. To see just how quickly or slowly the three solutions can perform, and to get a real-world idea of what their log processing capabilities are, we tested the length of time it took for each solution to download an 80MB log file to its proprietary database. The most successful solutions completed processing in less than 30 minutes.