[WEB4LIB] website stats analysis

[Jimm Wetherbee]

Michele,

Hello, I'd like to hear from people who are responsible for analyzing
their website statistics.   

[->] Have never used a separate tool (though I sometime wish I had one) bu
have importing my logs into MS Access and using queries for the analysis.

In using WebTrends, I find very little useful
information other than the information provided for "visitors." 

I can't, however, see the value in the numbers for "page views,"
"visits," and "hits," mostly because there is no way to eliminate staff
and public computers. And anyway, what is a "visit?" WebTrends says it's
all activity for one user.  So when "average visits per day" is 300,
what does that mean??? 


[->] I have a range of IP address that I know are local and run a query that
returns all local hits.  There are some limits to this.  Prior to any
analysis, I remove all entries aside from 50x and 20x for pages.  Since the
number of local machine is restricted, they often hit the same pages so the
number of 304 entries (which I delete) would be disproportionably high.  I
loose some valid activity.  
[->] Still, what you could do is create a query that pulls out all local
hits and then exclude those hits within a query that would look at hits for
a given page or directory. 

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