WebTrends vs. WebSideStory

[thomasray]

I am currently reviewing my options for a higher end analytics solution to my current WebTrends Analysis Suite Standard Edition. I am currently looking at WT Reporting Center Enterprise and WWS's Hitbox Enterprise. Does anyone have experience working with these specific products? Pro's Con's?

Any help would truly be appreciated.

[graywolf]

I just switched to Webtrends Reporting Center. It has a lot of new options like the calendar selector, custom date ranges and comparitive modes. If you have a lot of profiles that use the same data/filters, that part is much, much easier to manage.

What I dislike is you cant run "yesterday" reports, or "last week", "last month" reports. Also the export feture has to be done manually. I used to do a lot of text reports and then read thru them with programs and do automatic analysis, now it all has to be done manually.

[thomasray]

When you say you can't run certain "past" reports, you can work around that by using the custom date range report right? I assume so but wanted to make sure I wasn't misreading you.

I have the installed the trial version and I like it so far. Your right, the custom date range report is great.

Hitbox doesn't offer a trial version :(

[graywolf]

I used to use the Log filter to run reports on yesterdays date only, and save the file using the embeded date function. Something like basket_report_04082003.txt

I then had a vbscript that read the text file and extracted certain values and did some analytics, wrote those values to a table or another file. It was a completely hands off operation. To do it now you have to select the date manually export it manually and run the vbscript manually.

[Pedros_sr]

SurfStats has released a cat among the pigeons with their new SurfStatsLive. This program rocks! Pity it only runs on Windows 2000 servers.

[indomitable]

Both the examples you quote use 2nd generation, cache-buster type methods to gather data, but because they're not using proper client-side techniques to gather data you're still going to lose a certain amount of offline and cached traffic.

I have been testing a number of commercial client-side solutions recently (having read an Aberdeen white paper about how much better they were) and have found that this missing data can amount to 20-30% of your traffic (although the norm seems to be more like 10-20%).

If you're going to look at the more expensive solutions it would seem logical to get the best you can...

[thomasray]

indomitable,

Would you be able to recommend one?

[indomitable]

I wouldn't like to be seen to be plugging one here, but will recommend the one which seemed to give us the most accurate figures for us by SM...

[thomasray]

Ah, didn't mean to ask an unfair question. (Hey I'm a newbie).

Thanks for your help!

[Nanobot]

Hi... (i'm new on this forum)

We just switched from WebTrends to NetTracker and, wow, it is SO much better. Much more flexible, better algorithms. Way more bang for our buck. No, i don't work for Sane Solutions, i'm just a happy customer. :^)

[warlordbb]

We too recently switched from Webtrends to NetTracker. I don't work for Sane either but I will add my "yay, go NetTracker" to the thread. We are very pleased.