Using Microsoft Access

Dumb question.......

[SoleDrag]

I'm very new at learning about log files. We just bought Access to be able look at them, but I have a dumb question: Can I use Access instead of buying a stats analyzer program like NetTracker? I basically just need to find out the most popular keywords and search engines. Any help for a dork would be appreciated.

[cfx211]

You can use access to do most things that a log analyzer can do, but you need to know how to write queries in Access and you have to setup each query yourself.

The thing you will have to do in order to understand what drives traffic to you is to isolate the first entry in your log files for each user, put them in a separate table, then group by referring_url and count the rows.

Access is an easy way to manipulate data sets that you have created or need to slice and dice, but there are a lot of free tracking tools out there that will make your web reporting a lot easier than doing it in access.