Keeping track of your Web site
I cannot stress how important tracking your Web site's activity is.
This information lets you track how many people are visiting your site and what
they're doing. Many different packages are available for this purpose, but the
two I use regularly are WebTrends 3.5 and IIS Assistant (IISA) 3.5a.
Tim Daniels initially wrote about WebTrends in his July 1996 Web Development
column, "Internet Database Connectivity" (go to http://www.winntmag.com/issues/jul96/webdev.htm), and I first wrote about IISA in my
November 1996 WebDev column "Who's on Your Web Site?" (see
http://www.winntmag.com/issues/nov96/webdev.html). Both packages, however,
have come a long way since these articles. WebTrends and IISA have several new
features, many of which make tracking easier and faster.
WebTrends 3.5
The most noTable improvement in WebTrends is the big jump in performance.
With versions 1.0 and 2.0, my 200MB weekly log files took 8 hours to 10 hours to
process on my 150MHz Pentium Pro. But with versions 3.0 and 3.5, my now 500MB+
weekly log files take about 30 minutes to process on the same computer.
According to WebTrends' manufacturer, e.g. Software, this package analyzes and
produces a complete report at a speed of 7MB to 9MB per minute on a 166MHz
Windows NT Pentium. With my Pentium Pro, I average almost 17MB per minute, which
is almost twice as fast.
WebTrends is a 32-bit Windows application that runs on NT 3.51, NT 4.0, and
Windows 95. It's compatible with log files that you create using any Web server,
including Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Netscape, O'Reilly
WebSite, Apache, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and
CERN. WebTrends does not have to run on your Web server. In fact, I advise
against this practice, because when WebTrends operates, it uses all the server's
resources. Any server would have a hard time running WebTrends and serving up
Web pages.
To use WebTrends' extended logging ability, you only need to install the
appropriate plug-in for your Web server: the Internet Server API (ISAPI) or the
Netscape API (NSAPI) Plug-Ins for Microsoft IIS and Netscape Extended Log Files.
These plug-ins let your Microsoft IIS or Netscape Web server log additional
information, such as referring-site, browser, and OS data. In other words, these
plug-ins help you gather important data--data that will help you understand your
audience, and, in turn, help you design your site.
Because I run the magazine's Web site from two Web servers, a must-have
feature in Web tracking software is support for multiple servers. WebTrends can
create one report from the logs of both servers. To look at the big picture at
the end of the week, I simply put the two log files in the same directory and
tell WebTrends to analyze the *.log file. This procedure sure beats having to
make one file out of two 200MB+ files.
WebTrends has the option of creating output in HTML, Microsoft Word 95 or
Word 97, and Microsoft Excel 95 or Excel 97. Excel output offers convenience
(the numbers are right there; no more cutting and pasting) and flexibility (you
can perform any number of analyses on the numbers). With both Excel and Word
output, you can create professional-looking, functional reports, complete with
graphs. Word reports are ready to be printed, bound, and handed to management.
Of all WebTrends 3.5's new features, the one I like best is the new speed
in which the software gets reports to me. But you might prefer one of WebTrends
other features. These include:
Automatic compression of log files for Netscape and Microsoft
servers. Enhanced plug-ins for Netscape and Microsoft servers let you
automatically compress log files. Each time your Web server starts a new log
file, WebTrends compresses the old one. If you've ever zipped a log file, you
know that compression reduces file volume by as much as 90 percent.
Bandwidth reporting. WebTrends provides Tables and graphs
on both hits and bytes transferred to help you understand the bandwidth
requirements of your Web site.
Authenticated user reporting. If you require users to log
on to the server, you'll find this new feature useful. WebTrends authenticates
users' names, and reports this information in Tables and graphs.
Run as a service. An option you can select is to have
WebTrends run as an NT service and perform realtime analysis, realtime
reporting, and automatic scheduling of users. Because this option runs as a
service, it works transparently, even when no users are logged onto the system.