Analyzing weblogs is a pain in the neck. Gazillion of data points, but no real useful information. Once you know that your users show up usually at 7pm, that 99% have javascript enabled, that 30% of them are rebels using Firefox or Safari instead of IE, and that they view 3,4 pages on average per visit, where are you left at ? nowhere.
All these stats is what you usually get from Webalizer, the open source Apache log analysis package you get for free. Unless I'm totally mistaken, there's not much you can do with it. AWstats is presumably a better package, as it uses Perl (who cares, really?), and can report session durations (full comparison table here). I'm still getting nowhere.
What I am really looking for, is an industry grade that I can configure to tell me, in simple reports:
- how many visitors I get (yeah... the unique kind, returing and new is good too)
- how they navigate through my site (what page they jump to, in what order, etc.), so that I can optimize the recruitment funnel
- how many do something (such as pay), as % of every other step.
Now, I've tried a number of solutions available here in France: Statcounter, SiteMeter, estat, Xiti. Too compliacated for me to use, altjhough I should really give them some more time.
Recently I came accross Urchin. Never heard of these guys before. Nevetheless, Google has just the elegance to buy them. It seems I need to do some homework again.
So, what do YOU use to optimize your traffic on your commercial web sites? Any other marketing tool you feel like sharing with the community ? thanks in advance.
