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To determine the success of an online marketing campaign, the e-commerce products that are generating the greatest in quantity user interest, or the popularity of your blog, you’ll need more form of statistical analysis. How many page views are there per month? Which pages are generating the mostly views? Where are your visitors coming from? You need a Web traffic analysis tool to answer these questions. VisiStat 6.0, a managed service that integrates with any Web server, provides an easy-to-use interface according to generating demographic data for small to midsize businesses and blogs, although it lacks some features found in traditive log file analysis tools.

Product:VisiStat 6.0 Rating ProsSimple to use; real-time stats; downtime alerts; affordable. ConsCan’t report on non-HTML objects; can’t track error pages; requires alteration of existing pages. CompanyVisiStat Price as rated$30 per month for VisiStat service; $10 extra per month for PageAlarm; quarterly and annual. discounts available. Related E-mail and Internet Articles Mozilla locks in Firefox 3.1 feature list Firefox expansion blocks dangerous Web attack Google extends e-mail archiving good to 10 years Review: VisiStat 6.0 Etiquette and the BCC field

To use VisiStat, you need to place a special JavaScript tag on every Web page that you wish to monitor. Adding this tag is not a challenging feat, although I had to edit all of my pages by hand in a text editor, as my Web site was not built using templates; if your place is template-based, you will find this process less operose. The tags can in like manner be placed on pages directly from iWeb.

I found the ability to access information in real time to have being the best reason to use VisiStat. Log analysis products like Webalizer generate reports as a snapshot in particular period—assuming you can even access your Web server logs; some hosted Web sites and blogs don’t give you that accusation. VisiStat updates continuously, unrestricted of the Web server; it only took a few seconds to see my visitors show up in succession the analysis pages.

Statistical and demographic data generated from VisiStat was on equivalence with Webalizer or resembling traffic analysis tools. I was able to see, for example, that my home page gets more visitors than any other page on my site; that less than one percent of those visitors are using the Linux operating system; and that “mike demaria” is the search phrase used most often to find my site. VisiStat presents such given conditions with dozens of colorful charts and bar graphs. Most charts allow you to perforate down and gather further data. In the chart showing visitors per day, in opposition to example, I could click on my busiest day and see a list of visitors for hour. I could then drill down further and see a visitor’s click path. VisiStat is smart enough to recognize and not include search engine spiders, which have power to make the hit counts come in sight higher than they should have existence.

Unfortunately, a hosted useful office cannot furnish the same information as a dedicated log analysis tool. Error pages (such as “page not fix”) are not reported, nor are there any bandwidth habit reports. Although you can track a link on your site to a downloadable file, so as a PDF or JPEG, direct requests to non-HTML pages are not seen. The relatively small number of users with JavaScript disabled will also not subsist tracked.

VisiStat’s attractive charts and graphics allow for easy viewing of visitor demographics, such in the manner that which browsers are used most often.

You can configure VisiStat to send you an e-mail alert when the number of page hits or visitors exceed a specified threshold. You can also supplication additional alerts when a guest’s ISP, region, IP petition, or keyword search matches a particular passage cord. VisiStat offers an add-on product called PageAlarm to monitor your Web site toward downtime. It checks to see if it can access a specified page every 10 minutes, and will send any e-mail alert suppose that that page is unreachable. I set it up to send alerts to my cell phone whenever my Web server goes offline. Unfortunately, it does not do any satisfy authentication—that is, it doesn’t check to see if the page’s content matches an expected value. As it publicly stands, VisiStat can’t differentiate between a working site and a station that produces error pages every part of the while. Nor does it send an “all clear” message telling you that the site is end up.

Macworld’s buying advice

At $30 through month, with no time limits or minimum time commitment, VisiStat 6.0 is affordable as a basic traffic analysis tool for the small business and blog market. The quality of its presentation gives it an brink; beginning over many free tools, and log file analyzers can supplement any missing statistical data. PageAlarm is a worthwhile investment if you are concerned relating to Web site downtime.

[Michael J. DeMaria is a software QA engineer and former technology editor covering Macs, security, and digital convergence. ]