Any software you might use to make sense of your Web site is likely to find its way onto a list of log analysis tools. There are a lot of tools and many more become available every day. The last time I looked, there were nineteen of them at this Yahoo! category:

http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Software/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Servers/L og_Analysis_Tools/. But there were another forty-three at this site:

http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Communications_and_N etworking/Internet_and_World_Wide_Web/Software/World_Wide_Web/Log_Analysis_Tool s.

Most of the products on those lists are actually log analysis tools: the tools that take in your server logs and hand back reports of various kinds. These tools don't know about your backend legacy systems. They don't know about registrations, purchases, customer service emails, or things that are served up dynamically from a database. Everything they know and report on they learn from your server logs.

WebTrends

Probably the most well known of the log analysis tools is WebTrends (www.webtrends.com). They've been at it the longest. "Log Analyzer," says their site, "is the web traffic analysis software package that introduced the WebTrends brand to web administrators and marketing managers everywhere. It's the ideal entry-level package for any small business ready to apply insights into visitor behavior to improve overall site performance." You can download a free trial version and pay the $500 if you like what you see, so the price is right.

The basic version of WebTrends delivers a healthy amount of information for the money and tracks the following information:

Hits

• Entire site (Successful)

• Average per day

• Home page

Page Views

• Page views (impressions)

• Average per day

• Document views

Visitor Sessions

• Visitor sessions

• Average per day

• Average visitor session length

• International visitor sessions

• Visitor sessions of unknown origin

• Visitor sessions from United States

Visitors

• Unique visitors

• Visitors who visited once

• Visitors who visited more than once