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NetIQ (formerly WebTrends) is the market leader in Web analysis, and while Quantified Systems' Urchin is close on its heels, WebTrends had the upper hand. WebTrends runs under Microsoft Windows NT and 2000, Linux and Sun Solaris. While not as fast as Urchin, WebTrends drew second place for speed. It also comes with a built-in database, though you can add support for SQL Server or Oracle (in fact, Oracle and NetIQ announced in December that they will offer a product combining Oracle9i Application Server and NetIQ's Web analysis tool).

We found the Web interface very easy to use -- the only annoyance was that requested reports took a few seconds to display; Urchin reports popped up immediately. If you want good-looking, easy-to-read graphs and reports that can go directly to transparency, WebTrends is the product for you. We were able to quickly see which directory and which pages were viewed most often, and from which directory most data was transferred. In addition, you can see the top browsers used: We found out that more than 80 percent of hits came via Microsoft Internet Explorer (version numbers can be examined separately).

The best aspect of this product is its e-commerce analysis. Say you have a couple of products that fit a similar style or category. You can create content groups that will let you set URL parameters to cluster items together, for instance. If the URL contains a PID= field from one to 20, put those URLs into the socks content group; if the number is 21 through 40, put those URLs in shoes. We used this on the hotshoppe.com site to see how many people sought chicken hot sauces as compared with the number who requested steak sauces. For ISPs to take advantage of this feature, they may need to work with the site owner to gain access to an entire product catalog.

WebTrends' content-group feature (screen view) Click here to enlarge

We could further analyze visitors and URLs to project earnings. WebTrends refers to this as qualifications. A user with a low qualification may be someone who just looks at the main page. A higher qualification may indicate someone who goes to the shipping information page. This can be the cyber equivalent of seeing how many people pick up a trinket in your brick-and-mortar store and look at the different color options versus people just browsing.

You can also assign a dollar value to a qualification level. This can get a bit complex and require some marketing input, but basically you make predictions. For example, if a person looks at your shipping information page, on average he or she will buy goods that generate a $5 profit 50 percent of the time. So, you assign a high-qualification visitor a higher dollar value. This process should help you see which parts of your Web site are driving profits.

WebTrends Reporting Center. Available: Now. NetIQ Corp., (503) 294-7025; fax: (503) 294-7130. www.webtrends.com

Quantified Systems Urchin 3.3

Urchin is one speedy little sucker. It ripped through the Dreamscape site in 2.5 hours -- and when we turned off reverse DNS lookup it took only 40 minutes. It's a lot more interesting to have the domain name; otherwise you're looking at IP addresses -- that is, seeing search.yahoo.com is a lot better than seeing x.x.x.x. The product also runs on a heck of a lot of platforms, including Microsoft Windows NT and 2000, Apple Computer Macintosh OS X, Linux, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, BSD, and SGI Irix. And Urchin was the least expensive product in this review.

Urchin let us see which directory had the most hits, and we could also sort by bytes used. For example, the Dreamscape user with the most hits did not transfer the most data. We were also pleased with the way the product showed the top Web browsers. The interface shows each browser, and you can expand that data to show percentages based on version number. So in one screen you can check the percentage of IE 4.x traffic against that of Netscape 6. To take advantage of the e-commerce analysis capabilities of Urchin, you need to use the Urchin e-commerce log format.

Urchin's Web interface (screen view) Click here to enlarge

One of the neat parts of this is that you'll be able to see state-purchasing demographics culled from shipping information. Compare this with the way WebTrends does city information -- based on IP address, with, according to WebTrends, nearly everyone living in Virginia. Urchin is the only product we tested that does city demographics by shipping ZIP code. However, you must configure your Web server to log data in the eUrchin format, a special format for Urchin's product.

Urchin also lets you exclude certain reports. You can mark any of the reports as unavailable, and if a user decides to click on it, he or she will see only sample data. This way you can sell added services merely by changing a flag in a file. The user would get to see the sample data to know what the reports will look like. All reports are processed during import time, so any report can be turned on or off at run-time. You can't add users to specific access levels; it works globally on a site-by-site basis. This feature is an advantage Urchin has over the other products, which do not allow this on-the-fly report control. This is not the same as customer isolation, however. To isolate sites from each other, you need to configure the IIS Web server with password-protected directories.

In addition, reports are archived for as long as you desire. And you can specify a range of time to display data by day -- for example, we could see top pages for a three-day block.

Urchin 3.3. Available: Now. Quantified Systems, (619) 233-1400; fax (619) 233-6510. www.urchin.com