Forum Moderators: DixonJones
Right, I can well imagine that my topic has been asked many, many times but I thought I'd post a new thread anyway, as I have my own story to tell.
To cut a long story short (and to stop me getting irate) we've used WebTrendslive for years, on all sites possible. That was fine until they started to degrade the service (take away 'Referrers' etc) and finally, pull the plug altogether a month-or-two ago.
So, we're used to paying nothing, but would consider the W/T Business Edition, which at $35 a month allows 50,000 page views. That's great, except for one little thing, for 2 months of the year we serve *3 Million* pages per month (plus around 150,000 for a 3rd month!)
So, given that were a fan site, we can't afford to pay the 'overage' costs which, from my head, would be something like $2000-$3000 per month for the busy months. That said, I was rather hoping to sell between £10,000 and £20,000 of advertising this year, so are we just being tight? Then again, when you have such a small window of opportunity, you want to retain every penny!
So, my question is: "What are the alternatives?", given that Webtrends have conceded they can't really help us... something I think is absolutely unbelievable and I am also rather annoyed that we've been promoting their company via buttons on sites for years.
Anyway, I believe W/T offer some $500 software to decipher log files but I understand the current way of doing things (client side- button/code on every page) is more accurate. Not only that, but we already had issues before with log files filling up (or whatever - sorry I'm not a tech) and slowing the site down. Not sure what they were specifically, but it cost us every time it happened to get our Host's techs to empty the log files or the site was at a standstill.
So, sorry that this is such a long post but if you have any advice, it would be most grateful as we currently have no tracking at all. BTW what we like about W/T was the nice look of the graphs (for showing advertisers) and need: unique users, total page impressions, referrers, search engine referals, page exits information. No online sales and obviously, reliabilty is essential - don't want a cheapy/free option that will be down all the time etc.
Your help is greatly appreciated.
JD, UK
Sorry to hear about your tracking woes - however, there are quite a few alternative stats packages out there (many free) that you could try out. We had quite a discussion on people's preferences here [webmasterworld.com]
