Assembling a corporate Web site may seem so simple--grab a free copy of a Web server, post just about any content and watch all your marketing dreams come true. The reality isn't quite such a piece of cake, though. Today's Web sites can send hundreds of megabytes of log files to back-end databases, enabling a depth of analysis beyond your wildest imagination.

To view the Report card.Using Web cookies and the latest log-analysis programs, you can track, store and report on a remarkable amount of information about individual visitors to your Web site. Tie in your existing corporate database, and you can customize your online offerings based on visitors' preferences, and eventually generate historical reports to find out how many are sufficiently satisfied with your site to make repeat visits. With Web servers' current configurations and high-end log-analysis software, you can learn more about a virtual user than about a shopper physically present in a store.

To help you determine which log-analysis software package will best help you realize your site's potential, we tested the leading contenders at Syracuse University in one of Network Computing's Real-World Labsý. The good news is that we saw vast improvements in the products compared with versions we tested a year ago. All the products can produce sophisticated, customizable reports that will deliver valuable information to Web administrators and senior management alike. Of course, no matter how rich a report you get, remember that software is still just a tool; someone in the organization must be equipped to analyze the reports and apply the information to improve the site.

And even with the incredible advances in log-analysis software made during the past year, most packages still could do a better job of error analysis. net.Genesis Corp.'s net.Analysis is the only product we tested with built-in, on-the-fly reports featuring intelligent error checking. The desire for true user demographics also remains unfulfilled. Although most log-analysis vendors claim to provide detailed user demographics (including country, state and city), they don't make it clear to Web administrators that the information is coming from WhoIs, an Internet service that reports on contact information for DNS and IP Internet domains registered by the InterNIC. WhoIs queries are not a reliable source of demographic data because those who reach your site through a major ISP will appear by default to be located at the service provider's headquarters. For example, according to WhoIs queries, all America Online users appear to be at the online service provider's headquarters in Vienna, Va. However, none of the packages write these locations into their reports.

Getting Down to Business We separated each product's reporting features into two categories--marketing and technical--to reflect the different needs of the people accessing log-analysis data. While Web administrators focus on page layout, errors, path analysis and browser summaries, marketers eye ad analysis, user demographics and search-engine queries (the ability to pick out keywords in user searches).

We evaluated commercial enterprise-class Web server log-analysis tools from Marketwave Corp., Microsoft Corp., net.Genesis and WebTrends Corp. We judged the four contenders based on performance (how long it took to import and run reports), ease of use, quality of reports, information provided to administrators and marketers, and price.