We've been talking about GA. Let's explore some of the other tools. How many of you are using Web trends?
What are the strengths? What are the weaknesses?
Let's talk about it!
Joined on 10-17-2007
TechSoup Member
Our Non-Profit stopped using WT recently and switched over to GA:
Strengths:
1. You receive a comprehensive, mind-boggling amount of data that is captured, compared, graphed, charted and analyzed.
2. The reports are beautifully charted for you. And you can export the data (in myriad ways) into stunning, Fortune-500 Executive Boardroom quality PDF print-outs.
Weakesses:
1. Expensive, although they do have a Non-Profit price discount.
2. The size of the javascript is massive. When we launched our new site, it quadrupled the page size when the WT tracking code was added.
3. The interface was slow, clunky.
I still use an old copy of WebTrends Professional when I really want to dig into a site to see what is going on. From my prespective all the stats programs that use JavaScript are about the same. I would almost always choose one that uses the log files from the server.
Those that use hosting with Godaddy would not have this available, but I don't know of any other hosting provider that does not offer at least the log files.
I would be interested in hearing from some people that use Funnelweb, Sawmill, or other stats applications that use log files. But with things like Webalizer and AWStats being free, and included with most hosting accounts I expect most people don't bother.
Joined on 09-27-2007
TechSoup Member
just posted asking if people are interesting in forming a coalition to share web stat data anonymously ... check the thread.