Good WebTrends Features

Anyone found any good tools.

[tosspot17]

I'm new to Webtrends and i'm just wading through at the moment, but i thought people here might have some good info on just what the package is capable of.

I'm using Webtrends 7, are there any great features i should know about. I'm sure i'll get to them in time if there are,but can anyone give me a head start?

Cheers,
Chris.

[edit_g]

Top Search Engines with Search Phrases is one I find quite useful. :) But I'm using an earlier version.

[graywolf]

Content groups - allows you to group pages together
visit filters - hit something anywhere in the visit
common paths - you can pick any page and specify how many steps to go forward (I found anything more than 5 steps to be too confusing)
I also like that you can re-use filters from one profile to the next saves a lot of time.

[TheWebographer]

But you always have to take what Analysis packages give you with a grain of salt. I regularly run 3 or 4 (webtrends, Analog, Webalizer, and others) and get very different results from all of them. User sessions often vary by 25% for example.

The fact is, HTTP is a stateless protocol. This makes absolute measurements impossible.

But clients like to see pretty charts showing how great their website is doing. The log analyzing business responds to this by putting out the software but that does not mean it is entirely accurate.

[cornwall]

>>The log analyzing business responds to this by putting out the software but that does not mean it is entirely accurate.<<

I agree that it is not accurate, but it does give you accurate trends. In other words you can compare time periods and see whether visits are going up by how much of a percentage, which are the high volume referral sites, what are the keywords used and so on.

IMO its a bit more than giving clients "pretty charts", but I would agree that that helps ;)

[graywolf]

I have used webtrends for a few years and found it very valuable. Is it 100% dead-on accurate no, and I doubt any log analysis product is. You have to be careful when you blindly follow something without using any common sense. You know there is an old joke about a statistician who drowned while wading across a river with an average depth of 4ft...

[sublime1]

We looked at Web Trends recently, and to do what we wanted we would have had to pony up the full $10K. All the capabilities were there in the cheaper versions but disabled (with all the bloat of the full version). We have since gone with a competing tool which was very inexpensive, runs on Linux (as well as NT and other platforms) and provides an amazing depth of features. It seems to be scaling to modest volumes without sweating ... yet.

I am new to posting here, not sure if its ok to say the name of the product we're using.