Forum Moderators: DixonJones
I find Hitslink very robust and providing all the necessary realtime info for post analysis and advance planning. In addition, their Enterprise edition have the added features of tracking PPC campaigns plus more attractively price (regular version fees based on pageviews, Enterprise on unique sessions/daily visits).
Starts at $20/month for 20K pageviews.
Maxamine is a high-end package that allows quick and comprehensive analysis of potential, new and existing client sites.
It can quickly determine trouble areas of a site: file sizes, broken links, missing referrals (internal/external), link structure (number of click) to any page from any page, non-returning pages (back-button needed), header data (all pages in one place), tags and element attributes, and more.
Unlimited pages can be analysed in a few minutes.
It increases proficiency within a specific site and cuts the workload down about 75%, for optimizing.
In addition, the logfile analyser (which superimposes traffic directly onto the site's link structure) shows traffic patterns and corridors which is exceptional (high traffic sites) to improve usability and direct nav paths for pages of high interest, as well as determining hotspots for promotional links, banners, etc.
Starts at 2k per domain and volume domain discounts with yearly fees at 20% of purchasing price.
Webtrends Reporting Centre in the office, but moving over to NetTracker soon - a far superior product IMHO, and the licensing is way more economical for clustered servers.
Had a play with Sawmill as well - a nice product in the right environment.
Recently started testing counted.com
Also testing hitbox pro
The real problem that I see is that cookie based systems seem to be getting less reliable as firewalls start blocking cookies and logfile systems were never reliable as ISPs sent too many people out on the same IP number.
"Oh to be able to trust my daily uniques"
FastStats Analyzer: Blindingly fast compared to anything else I've tried, with great reports. Its only weaknesses are (1) There's no "spiders/robots" report, and (2) You need to set up and run separate reports for different time periods such as "yesterday," "last month," "month to date," or whatever.
Sawmill: A lot of information, and you can select stats for a day, week, month, year, etc. just by clicking the appropriate date or caption on a calendar. Unfortunately, Sawmill can be painfully slow (whether you're adding the new day's data or just going from view to view), and its stability leaves something to be desired. I use it mainly to view spider/robot statistics and to view charts of long-term trends.
By the way, I recently upgraded my FastStats to the FastStats Analyzer Gold version, and the upgrade was well worth the extra hundred bucks. The latest version of FastStats Analyzer Gold has "site stickiness" statistics and a fantastic "Hyperlink" view (it looks something like a flow chart) where you can look at a page and see where traffic is coming into the page and going out. You can then follow the traffic from page to page, and the chart is updated as you click. For convenience in selecting pages to look at, there's a little window where you type in part of a name (say, "wid") and get a menu of pages with that character string ("widgets.htm," "blue-widgets.htm," and so on).
FastStats Analyzer Gold will also generate HTML versions of its reports (unlike the standard version of FastStats Analyzer, which generates HTML versions of only a few basic reports like general statistics).
A trial version of the standard program is available at Mach5.com. I don't think you can download the Gold version without buying it, but you can play around with the standard version and then look at the sample screens for the Gold version to see if it's worth the extra cost.
Logfile analyzers:
- Webtrends, for the clients that can accept their license policy (less and less clients accept that)
- FastStats for quick (not allways accurate) stats - or large logs
- ClickTracks for click stream analysis
Trackers:
- IndexTools
Network packet sniffing
- Unispeed Netlogger