Author Archives: Vladimir

Web Log Storming 2.0: beta available for free download

Web Log Storming screenshotWe have just released beta version of our interactive web log analyzer (web stats) software Web Log Storming 2.0 – free for all until final release is out.

Web Log Storming is an interactive, desktop-based web log analyzer for Windows. A whole new concept of website statistics makes it clearly different from any other web log analytics software. Browse through stats to drill down into details – down to an individual visitor’s session. Check the pattern of individual visitor behavior and how it fits into your goals.

Web Log Storming does far more than just generate common reports. It displays detailed web site statistics with interactive graphs and reports. Complete and detailed log analysis of activity from every visitor to your web site is only a mouse-click away.

Download Web Log Storming beta

Version 2.0 introduces number of new features and improvements, including:

  • Goals
  • Tabbed reports
  • Six new report types (including cities and regions)
  • New parameters and global filters
  • Better speed and stability
  • Other usability / user interface improvements

For more details, download and special “early bird” offer, visit product beta page.

Any comments or suggestions are more than welcomed!

Product web page

Beta information page

Which web log analyzer should I use?

Web log analysis softwareAnybody who maintains or owns a website should be interested in access statistics and can make a good use of web log analyzer. However, there are too much similar products on the market and users can be pretty much confused. They often think “Why should I pay for website stats software when there are free alternatives?” Read on to find out.

Regarding price, web stats software can be divided into three main groups:

  1. Free or Open Source
  2. Middle-priced
  3. High-priced

Having this in mind, it looks like users can be divided into three groups as well:

  1. Hobby
  2. Small and middle business
  3. Large corporations

Free analyzers

If you run a personal or hobby site that you don’t make money from, than you would probably be satisfied with free software: Analog, Webalizer, AWStats – to name a few. It’s natural, after all: you don’t depend on results of this software and you can’t do much to raise zero earnings. Free analyzers will satisfy your curiosity, and not much more than that.

There’s another “free” analyzer that’s most popular in last few years: Google Analytics. It actually falls somewhere in between first and second group and it deserves separate section of this article (see below).

Commercial analyzers

If you depend on your business (online or offline), you’ll need more that satisfying curiosity. You’ll need to know as much as it’s possible about your visitors: their behavior, technical data (browsers, operating systems), “dead ends” on your web site, etc. You will also need to calculate specific conversions. Conversion is the ratio between total number of visitors and visitors that took a wanted action (software download, mailing list subscriptions, orders, etc). Depending on this analysis, you will change your web site to achieve better comprehension, better wording effects, better conversion, and better earnings eventually. In this case, you should consider some commercial alternatives.

But not all commercial software is the same. A lot of them offer almost identical set of functionality as free ones, with little differences here and there. Some of them even look like exact clones of each other. It’s very hard to examine dozen of similar software. If first few of them don’t offer something new and interesting, you’ll probably give up eventually and turn back on free alternative.

One may think: “Of course they are similar! They all take same log files as input and they produce reports as output. In how many different ways you can do this?” If this is what you are thinking too, you may be surprised.

Google Analytics

Currently most popular web analytics solution and the synonym for web statistics for lot of people. Like WinZip is considered as synonym for archive software, but does that mean that those two are best on the market?

Google Analytics is a decent web statistics application, for the price. It definitely has better set of features than other free alternatives. However, it’s JavaScript based, which does bring several advantages (ability to get screen resolutions, connection speed reports, more exact visitor detection), but losing some important benefits of good old raw log files at the same time. For example:

  • You must change your web pages to include scripts
  • Scripts take additional time to load
  • You are limited to page stats, while file hits (exe, pdf, zip, …) are ignored
  • Because of this, bandwidth report doesn’t make sense
  • You cannot see how bots (spiders) are (mis)behaving
  • You don’t have any information about visitors with JavaScript disabled – like they don’t exist
  • You must wait for 24 hours until stats are refreshed
  • Stats and goals from the past are lost (from the period before including scripts)
  • And last, but not least, your stats are available to a third-party who can (and does) use it for self purposes. See the article “What price Google Analytics?” by Dave Collins.

While it offers number of cross-reports, you don’t have the full control and you can’t drill down to the level of individual visitor. You can’t identify the spiders that pull your entire website several times a day, wasting the bandwidth. There’s also no easy way to discover errors (“page not found”, “internal server errors”), hacker attacks, external pages that include images from your website or direct file hits (file downloads and other non-html documents). These are all serious drawbacks in our (and I believe everyone’s) business.

In essence, if you get over some of its disadvantages (at least regarding privacy), Google Analytics can be useful as an additional tool to log file based analyzer, but depend your business solely on it would be a major mistake.

Web Log Storming

Interactive web log analyzer - Web Log StormingWhen we started online business, naturally, we were in the same quest as you might be right now. By trying out free and commercial software at that time, we kept feeling that something is missing. Sure, you can see visits over the time, although some analyzers tend to mix up visitors and page views, which is unacceptable. You can also see top pages, referrers and browsers. But there was no easy way to drill down to the level of single visitor or hit, or to create custom cross-reports – easily limiting data by date or any other information available in raw log files.

That’s why we have decided to make an interactive web log analyzer that will allow users to extract the information that they need at that moment.

Web Log Storming is different. It doesn’t take the usual and fixed route: log file > analyze > report. It doesn’t make much unnecessary assumptions about what you need to know. It loads log files and lets you analyze them. It lets you look at stats from different angles, taking in consideration different parameters.

Note: Because of its nature, it’s intended for small and medium business use and it’s consequently priced (middle-range). If your website is visited by tens or hundreds of thousands every day, this software is unfortunately not for you, as interactive features are hard to accomplish with such traffic.

Let’s name few use-cases.

Specific page visit (or download) per referrer. What’s the use of high traffic from Google if only small number of visitors actually goes further than quick and probably worthless glance over landing page? None. And sometimes you actually pay for those visits. With Web Log Storming you can limit referrer to Google (or AdWords campaign) and see any other report based on it (including page hits, paths, countries, etc).

List sessions with all details from a specific domain. Want to learn about your specific visitor – possibly big client? Do you want to know his first visit, original referrer, visited pages and time that he spent on each of them? You can draw a conclusion about his seriousness and interests and act accordingly. For example: you can discover that possibly important business proposal originates from 10th page of the rather generic Google search – it speaks a lot about how serious the proposal is.

See referrer report based on country. If your business rarely benefits from specific countries and you still have traffic from them, can you see which website they originate from? Is it a shady website that actually hurts your business and bandwidth?

Web Log Storming gives you this and much other exotic info, as we like to say, “on-the-fly”. Not much other analyzers can do that.

Add Web Log Storming to your “software to evaluate” list – take a free trial. And when you experience its possibilities, with your log files under the hood and your goals on your mind, you can decide what to do next. In the meantime, feel free to contact us for any questions or problems that you might have.

What to do if you don’t get response from us

If you are in hurry, read at least last paragraph of this post.

E-mailBecause of serious amount of spam messages circling around on the global net, e-mail servers and spam filters become more and more rigorous during the time. This could really be a problem as legitimate e-mails often don’t get through. There are also other reasons for similar problems (for example, typo in the e-mail address), but this one is most probable.

It’s a really unpleasant situation for us: time after time we receive angry e-mails from our customers because they feel that we are ignoring their support requests, which is quite understandable and justified. In some cases we are forced to reply with several different options (SMTP servers) hoping that at least one of them will succeed, but if any of users don’t confirm the reception, there’s a living suspicion in the back of our minds.

So, here’s a firm statement: We don’t leave any of support requests unanswered intentionally. Yes, sometimes, if problem cannot be easily resolved, it could take some time, but even then we will send a notification that you have been heard and that we will get back to you eventually.

Is there really a solution?

Although not perfect, best bet would be to use our Support Ticket System instead of simple e-mail. In this case, you can be sure that we will get the message, and, what’s more important, there would be an always accessible web copy of the conversation.

IMPORTANT: When you submit a ticket, you should receive an e-mail informing you about it, among with direct web link to this copy. If you don’t receive this e-mail in few minutes, that’s a good signal that something is wrong, probably in server-server relation. In this case, please save direct link presented in the web browser after submitting ticket, so you can use it later to check if your request has been answered.

Articles: The Importance of Log Analysis

Dave Collins (Shareware Promotions) wrote great series of articles about importance of log analysis. He also emphasizes and explains key metrics that every webmaster should be aware of, and suggests several software solutions.

It’s a great resource, even for experienced webmasters.

“A company’s web server logs are one of the most important and often-neglected sources of information at their disposal.”

Save your time when analyzing your log files

If you sometimes use Web Log Storming to analyze large amount of data it could take some time. If you want to use your computer for some other tasks, such as read your email, browse internet or anything else, you can instruct Web Log Storming to decrease demand for your computer resources.

While log files are being processed look at lower right part of window, on top of button “Cancel”. You’ll notice Label “Priority”. Clicking on it will allow you to choose Analyzer priority. If you select “Low” then working with other programs will become much comfortable.

Web Log Storming: Using File and Path parameters

We are makers of Web Log Storming. It was released to public more than a year ago, and unpolished version we use almost for 3 years. Despite of all that, it keeps surprising us with its capabilities. Almost to say: “We made a monster!” 🙂 One of the most powerful features is Path and File parameter.

Simplest use of File wildcard parameter is well known syntax: *.html, or *.html, *.exe. Maybe it’s not too obvious that this means “visited *.html or *.exe”. Other examples are:

  • +*.html, +*.exe
    visited *.html and *.exe”
  • +*.html, *.exe, *.zip
    visited *.html and any of *.exe or *.zip
  • +*.html, -*.exe
    visited *.html and not *.exe

Path parameter is similar, but can give more interesting results:

  • *, /a.html, *
    visited a.html (same as File wildcard: /a.html)
  • *, /a.html, /b.html, *
    visited a.html and b.html directly after
  • *, /a.html, *, /b.html, *
    visited a.html and b.html after (not necessary directly)
  • /a.html, *, /b.html, *
    entered at a.html and visited b.html after that
  • *, /a.html, *, /b.html
    visited a.html and exited from b.html

Using different combinations you can easily calculate specific conversions.