May 12, 2005

More Web Stats

A couple more developments on the web stats front today.

First, I tried out 123 Log Analyzer. The package installed fine, but took a bit of futzing to configure properly. There really wasn't anything wrong with the reports, but they didn't seem to go far beyond what the open source tools can do. I wasn't inspired.

Next, I contacted the ClickTracks folks and asked if they had any special pricing for non-profits/education customers. Turns out they did, and it brought the price down into that "no-brainer" zone. So, I went ahead and bought a license.

Does ClickTracks hit everything on my wishlist? Nope, but I think that's okay. It does nicely address the first two points on my list (drilling down to specific pages, and being able to view the user's path as they navigate the site). And, it does those things very well. I figure I can backfill some of the other items on the list by using other tools, either the open source ones or perhaps another commercial product.

So, I spent some good time this afternoon browsing through our site with the ClickTracks product. I showed a few co-workers, and I'm looking forward to sharing the stats with the whole team next week. This type of visualization really helps to show what parts of the site are being used and what parts aren't. I think we'll start to make changes to the site, and keep a close eye on how the stats change.

I have learned a couple of things about using ClickTracks. First, and this is likely specific to my setup, but I had noticed that the performance was pretty sluggish when using the demo. Then, duh, I realized that this was likely due to our IT infrastructure. Our "home" directories (My Documents) are stored on a server, and the ClickTracks data files were stored in the home directory. Meaning that it had to hit the network every time it wanted data. Not a big deal when you're throwing around 30k Word files, but a big deal in this case. So, saving the ClickTracks data file to the c: drive helped the performance quite a bit.

Next, I sure am happy that we're running all external links through a "jump" page. This makes it possible to track the percentages of users who leave the site. And, since the goal of the site is actually for users to leave (we want them to get off our site and onto the third-party sites that deliver the resources we provide), this is pretty helpful. And it means that unlike many other sites out there, we're actually looking for *lower* "average time on the page" figures. Lower means the users are finding their way to the resources (well, on those particular pages).

Anyway, thanks to everyone who wrote in with ideas and suggestions.