[WEB4LIB] Web Site Statistics

[Dan Lester]

At 09:43 AM 2/25/99 -0800, David Fulton wrote:
>Hello,
>
>We are interested in finding a program that will help us keep track of
>usage statistics for each link on our web site. This would be a tool for
>determining which links we should keep over the long term and which
>to delete.  We currently use Web Trends but this only keeps stats for
>pages, not individual links. I would be grateful for any
>recommendations. Thank you.

Assuming you mean you want to know WHERE your users go outside of your own 
pages, and how often, you can do this with a proxy server.  There is 
nothing on YOUR system to log or track where folks go outside of your 
server, no matter what log analysis software you use.

There are a variety of proxy servers available for various platforms.  If 
you want an inexpensive commercial product for Win9x and WinNT, check out 
www.wiinproxy.com for their product, which we find to be wonderful and 
fast.  There is a shareware version that will run for sixty days.  They 
have an educational discount too, but you have to ask for it. They'll not 
volunteer that information.  With educational discount I believe the price 
is under $300 for an unlimited 
license.   http://lester.idbsu.edu/proxy1998.htm  shows a bit of proxy log 
analysis for our proxy server.  The report only shows a small part of what 
a WebTrends report on a proxy server can show, but it clearly shows the 
most popular sites your users go to, the words they search on search 
engines most frequently, etc.  Our collection development and reference 
folks are beginning to use this information in their work.

Finally, IF you wanted to block various sites for whatever reason, the 
proxy server will easily handle that, too.  (We block chat and free email 
sites, plus game playing sites)

cheers

dan





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Dan Lester, 3577 East Pecan, Boise, ID 83716-7115 USA 208-383-0165
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