WebTrends, Useless Piece of Junk?

[markus007]

When a visitor goes to any page on my site it saves his sessionid and use information to a database and their referer etc. My site is in ASP.net and ASP, here are issues i found.

1. Log Analyzer v7.0c isn't recording hits from referers of the form www.domain.com/folder/file.htm.

2. For some sites sending me traffic its accurately recording referals, but others it lists 32 referals when there were actually 300, or even worse it just doesn't list sites that are giving me hundreds of referals a day.

3. Visits from spiders are way off to, googlebot came by 3000 times yesterday, but webtrends tells me 200 times..

I'm assuming most other people don't have thier own custom tracking system, so how do you deal with issues like this? I don't want to use my database for reports anymore because of the sheer volume of records and overhead..

[fom2001uk]

Webtrends is good at measuring "trends". Forget about absolute numbers. All tracking packages have serious flaws depending on how they work and actual numbers should be treated with a pinch of salt.

As long you're consistent in your tracking, the trends will give you valuable information over time (this page is more popular now than it was last month or last quarter, this search engine is sending me more visitors now than last month, etc).

Remember there's lies. damned lies, statistics, then there's web stats :-)

[killroy]

I do use my custome tracking. It's jsut fun to watch it chew through 2GB of logs in a few milliseconds... Nothing like site specific datafields and indices. Show me a log package that can do that...

SN