Web Log Storming v2.3 is now available for download. Changes in this release contain several new features that will make Web Log Storming easier to use, some improvements and additions and, of course, few bug fixes. As this is a free update for anyone who bought v2.x, we strongly recommend you to download and install an update.

Links:

Web Log Storming home page
Download an update

Recently I found few interesting questions about how to track custom variables with Google Analytics. The question well makes sense, even if your website is not a complex web application that your visitors log in to. “Simple” showroom websites could benefit from such kind information too, providing that you want to learn more about visitor behavior grouped by data not already included in stats. Here’s an example of how you can do this with Web Log Storming, but you might apply similar steps if you use some of other tools too.

Let’s say that you run online shoe-shop. At some point, you decide to present a simple survey to your visitors and put results into cookie information. In this case, you would probably be interested in demographic information such is gender, age, marital status, etc.

Disclaimer: I’m completely ignorant about selling shoes (Al Bundy would probably know better), so don’t mind if I completely missed what matters in this business.

Setting up a website

Step 1. Building a survey

First thing you need to do is to actually build a survey. How to do that is beyond scope of this article, so I’ll leave it to you. But all surveys have something in common: they contain questions. Let’s say that questions for this example are:

1. Gender (Male / Female)
2. Age (20-ies / 30-ies / 40-ies / 50-ies / 60-ies…)
3. Marital status (Single / In relationship / Married / …)

You get the picture. Put answers into a cookie and you’re ready for the next step.

Step 2. Logging this information

If these individual answers stay in visitor’s local cookies, you won’t be able to use them. It’s actually easy to “trick” a web server to write them down for you, and here’s how.

First, create a transparent 1×1 pixel gif image and upload it to your server (for example: myvars.gif). For your convenience, you can get one from here (right-click on link and save image).

Now change your web pages (or just one of them, depending how your website is organized) to include code into header or footer, similar to this:

<img src="/path-to/myvars.gif?g=<?php $_COOKIE['gender']; ?>" />
<img src="/path-to/myvars.gif?a=<?php $_COOKIE['age']; ?>" />
<img src="/path-to/myvars.gif?s=<?php $_COOKIE['status']; ?>" />

You would probably want to replace $_COOKIE[ ] parts with your functions, but we’ll keep it as simple as possible here.

These images will be invisible to visitors, but your log files will from now on contain lines like these:

1.2.3.4 [18/Oct/2009:22:20:06 -0600] "GET /myvars.gif?g=female HTTP/1.1" 200 ...
1.2.3.4 [18/Oct/2009:22:20:06 -0600] "GET /myvars.gif?a=40 HTTP/1.1" 200 ...
1.2.3.4 [18/Oct/2009:22:20:06 -0600] "GET /myvars.gif?s=married HTTP/1.1" 200 ...

Note the emphasized parts behind question marks. Instead of placing an image for each variable separately, you can combine them into one request, so your get ?g=female&a=40&s=married. It’s up to you how you want to track them later.

Now we only need to extract these into a meaningful statistics.

Extracting and analyzing custom variables

As I said before, it might be possible to analyze this info with other products (although often with limited possibilities), but here we’ll show how you can do that with Web Log Storming. For purely selfish reasons, of course.

First, you can use Queries report to see how popular each survey option is. If you define your Goals in this report you’ll also be able to see how well each of visitor groups convert.

Next and even more important, you can set up a Query parameter to focus on specific groups and analyze them separately. With Web Log Storming it’s really easy to do that (see the screenshot):

1. Type a filter into Query parameter (for example: “a=40″) and hit Enter. Whatever report you have active at this moment, it will now be based on visitors in forties only.
2. Optionally, click Lock button to base all other reports you select on the same set of visitors, until you explicitly remove this filter.

It’s simple as that, but there’s more possibilities for advanced filtering by combining more than one group, comma separated. Here are few examples as an illustration:

• s=married, s=relationship
  All visitors either married or in a relationship
• s=married, s=relationship, +g=male
  All male visitors either married or in a relationship (note the “+” sign)
• g=female, -s=divorced
  All female visitors who are not divorced (again, note the “-” sign)
• +a=30, +s=divorced
  All divorced visitors in their thirties

There are numerous combinations and possibilities, and for more info how wildcards work in Web Log Storming, check this page in the user manual.

Note: if you decided to combine all variables into one request (ie. ?g=female&a=40&s=married), you’ll need to enclose filters in wildcard (asterisk) character, like this: *a=40*, +*g=male*.

How to use these insights or “Why should I care”?

Common sense tells us that our website should “push” male shoes to males and female shoes to females, right? But is it possible that it’s not the best choice? What if your analysis show that married middle-aged males often buy shoes to their spouses as a gift? You would definitely want to make it easier for them to do so.

Or maybe you discover that divorced people, regardless of age, are more likely to buy more expensive shoes, so shouldn’t you present them an appropriate offers? Or maybe this doesn’t apply to divorced people in their sixties? Maybe people in sixties are generally not interested in expensive shoes, regardless of marital status?

There is lot of questions which all make sense to me, but I’ll just stop – if someone told me month ago that I will spend this much time thinking about shoe market… Besides, I’m sure you understood the importance of visitor segmenting buy now and that you know what questions relate to you business.

Links

Web Log Storming website
Web Log Storming 30-day trial download

According to “The Web Analytics War Reader Survey” by Unica, as published on eMarketer website (The Web Analytics Headache), lot of marketers have problems with their current web analytics solutions. This is a breakdown of the results:

Could our Web Log Storming be the remedy for at least part of those? Let’s see…

1. Verify accuracy of data (41%)

This is a major issue, and, to be honest, we are glad so many people are aware of it. Second graph above shows specific reasons.

a) Can’t drill into the data to verify numbers (42%)

Web Log Storming is all about drilling into details. It allows you to to actually see list of sessions/visitors (filtered by any metrics) and all available details of each one of them (visitor data and individual hits). This allows you to react and easily exclude those you don’t wish to affect your statistics (for example, spiders, yourself, your employees, etc).

b) Marketing attribution issues (32%) and Campaign tracking code issues (25%)

These are actually related to other accuracy problems (due to JavaScript and code problems, hits that JavaScript analyzers are unable to track, etc). As web servers log every single request, the risk of losing data is minimal. In fact, most argue that log analyzers are useless because of this, as people are generally not interested in spiders and similar “dummy” traffic. I partially agree: other analyzers  might be useless, but Web Log Storming’s ability to drill-down and easily filter out those is of utmost importance.

Back to the topic: with Web Log Storming you can define goals any way you like, as opposed to GA which allows you to assign a goals to pages only. Goal can be a page, sequence of pages, query, an image accessed from a third-party website (useful if you confide payments to specialized services), bandwidth usage, etc.

After setting a goal, every report shows conversion totals and percentages for each presented item (referrers, periods, pages, user agents, …) .

c) Issues with cross-site analysis (20%)

One solution for cross-site analysis is already mentioned in previous point: embed an image from your web server in a third-party web page (it can be white 1×1 pixel gif, invisible to visitors) and all hits to that page will be noted in your stats.

However, if you actually own and run several related websites, it would be nice if you could analyze them together. It’s not a problem for Web Log Storming. You should already have access to server logs, and all you need to do is to include them into the WLS project. It’s not even necessary for those websites to be on the same server – you can combine stats from IIS and Apache servers into joined reports. To easily distinguish hits from different websites, just use a Prefix option (/website1/index.html, /website2/index.html).

d) Can’t look up definitions of metrics and reports (19%)

In Web Log Storming, we tried to use as little technical terms as possible, and they are explained in a user manual page. By default, each report is described with one or two sentences at the bottom of the window, and user manual contains more detailed descriptions. Maybe it’s not enough, but we would like to hear any ideas for further improvements.

e) Issues with cookies (11%)

Web Log Storming doesn’t use cookies. But wait, don’t reach for a comment form yet: cookies do have their advantages over IP-based unique visitor detection, but vice-versa is true too. Which one gives better results? It probably depends on a website and profile of visitors. Here are few considerations to think about: more and more visitors use a broadband connection (with relatively static IPs), more and more visitors set up browsers to delete cookies, number of visitor that bring a laptop to another network is probably still outnumbered by visitors who use different computers on a different networks, etc.

You should really decide for yourself on this one… Point a) above (drilling down) should help you with it.

2. Not comprehensive/missing types of data (32%)

Some data is not possible to track with Web Log Storming, and it’s mainly related to client-side specifics, such is screen resolution, window size, JavaScript support, etc. This is purely because of technical limitation of server log files (this info doesn’t exist). If you really need them, you can always install some free JavaScript code. For everything else, there’s Web Log Storming.

3. Budget is too small to be useful (29%)

I must admit that I’m not sure if I understood this one. I suppose that it’s related to the fact that free stuff is rarely good enough and other solutions are too expensive to consider? Well, Web Log Storming is really not that expensive (some say it’s too affordable for the value it provides). There’s no recurring fees and, once you buy a license, you can use it freely forever. You get free upgrades for certain time and, after that period, you can stay with version you own without paying a single cent, unless you decide that improvements are worth the upgrade price (which is discounted, of course).

4. Page tagging difficulties or magnitude of effort (19%)

There’s no page tagging in Web Log Storming as it uses server log files, which almost all hosting companies provide (if it doesn’t, consider switching – seriously, as chances are that this is not the only problem you have with them). This is important, not just because for most people it’s easier to download log file than to edit pages or templates. Other benefits of not-tagging are:

• Log files (and thus statistics) exist even before you include tags.
• If you switch from one tag-based solution to another, you can kiss goodbye old data. If you switch from any kind of solution to a log-based solution, you still get all stats from the past. You’re not locked-in in any way.
• Code errors: omit a single but vital character and stats won’t work.
• Put a script code at the end of the page (as GA people suggests), and you risk that visitor will click away before page is fully loaded, resulting in lost hits.
• Put a script code at the beginning of the page and your website will become sluggish. Actually, total load time would be the same, but there’s more chance that visitors won’t notice it if code is at the end.
• Did you know that some people love to block Google Analytics and other similar tags?

5. Customer service issues (6%)

We are small company. Small companies, by definition, try harder. Every single customer and potential customer matters to us and we will commit any reasonable effort to make our software work for you in a way you want. We listen and welcome any new ideas and pursue any problem that you might have. Emails are responded by developers, not some independent (incompetent?) customer support service.

Yes, that’s a promise.

6. Vendor/solution/dashboard is too difficult to use (6%)

Not everyone can set up a separate job place for an analytics specialist (and, according to the survey, 72% of contenders don’t). Initially, we made Web Log Storming for ourselves, and made it reasonably understandable and easy to use for people who’s job title doesn’t contain “analytics” word. Part of this benefit lies in its interactivity, allowing you not to dedicate your life to predict what information you will need in the future. When you get a new idea, just dig out  that information from existing log files. That makes Web Log Storming a perfect solution for small businesses – get the right information at the moment you need it.

Conclusion

If I would want to play silly, I would say that it’s now proved that Web Log Storming is 159.09% better than any other web analytics solution. But seriously, everyone should ponder all available options and choose what works best for them.

Web Log Storming is a server log file analyzer, and, according to some previous blog comments and feedback, that appears to be a deal-killer for some people. It’s understandable. Google’s marketing machinery is slightly stronger than ours, and nobody gets fired by recommending IBM, Microsoft or Google. Sure, JavaScript solutions have own advantages, but please, hold back from putting Web Log Storming in a same basket with other log analyzers, at least not for now. If you wish to disagree with this post, it would be reasonable if you download and install free 30-days trial first, before forming and sending an opinion. Any critics directly related to our product are welcomed. Thank you for understanding!

Links

Web Log Storming web site
Download Web Log Storming free 30-days trial

Similar articles

Which web log analyzer should I use?
10 strengths of web log analyzers compared to JavaScript based analytics
Busting the Google Analytics Mythbuster

Excluding unnecessary hits from Web Log Storming reports by using global filters is an effective way to improve software performance. Newly added option in version 2.2 makes this process easier. Please read this short tutorial to see how to use it.

How to Easily Exclude Unnecessary Hits?

Web Log Storming v2.2 is now available for download. Changes in this release include several small new features, improvements and bug fixes.

New option for file reports: Add to Global Filters

Now you can more easily add unnecessary files to global filters (see “Improving performance” suggestions). To use it, view any of file reports (pages, files, images, directories, etc), see which files take lot of hits that doesn’t affect your stats (style sheets, logo images, etc), right click on them and choose “Add to Global Filters” option. Next time you read log files these will be excluded from reports.

New option: Manually Edit Host Name

This one is available in Sessions, Domains and Session Details report. You can now change visitor’s domain name to any text you like, so instead of having something like qwerty123456.domain.com, you can describe visitors as My home network or Important customer.

Introducing two editions: Standard and Professional

If you don’t need some of options, you can now buy less expensive Standard edition of Web Log Storming. Currently, Standard edition costs $119 (US) while Professional remains at the same price point ($189). Removed features include goals, host resolving, exchange options (export, print, send by e-mail, …), some reports, etc. For full list of differences please refer to this page.

Upon start, users who are evaluating trial version can choose which edition they want to try out. Existing customers won’t notice any change from this as all of you already have Professional version.

Other changes

Other less important  improvements and bug fixes.

Links:
Web Log Storming home page
Download an update
Compare editions

In just few days I’ve came across three examples of how “software for free” model hardly works, at least for developers. One of them is tr.im, the service to shorten long URLs. According to their blog, they’ve unsuccessfully tried to find an investor for their service. Of course, without proper funding, why would they spend any more time on it? And moreover, who will pay for hosting and other administrative fees? Second example is a project management / source control service codespaces.com. They recently decided to cease free plan and started charging $3 for it.

Another popular example is a great instant messaging client Digsby. They are trying to find a sustainable reason to continue developing it, and, as it seems, they plan to do that by displaying advertisements. In my opinion it’s a wrong method. So called “adware” model was popular about 10 years ago and it failed miserably. What happened now is that part of the community is actually angry on Digsby management. Can you believe it?

Related joke

One man was giving a $100 bill to a beggar every single day. After some time, those 100 bucks gradually became 50, 40, 30, and finally one day he gave him only $10.

B: Excuse me, sir. Can I ask you something?
M: Sure!
B: How come you always gave me $100 and now it’s only $10?
M: Well, you know, in the meantime I got married and we got a kid, our expenses are much higher now, we are building a new house…
B: A house? You are building a house? With MY money???

There simply must be a way of paying those developer-days/months/years or the whole project is doomed. Just browse some of Open Source repositories and check how many software sits abandoned. Alas, developers must eat too. Some businesses succeeded to persuade Venture Capitalist to initially invest money for the development, but sooner or later this VC will stop throwing funds away and expect the return of this investment. It’s simply how economy works, like it or not. As some have predicted before, this whole “software should be free” bubble will burst, and it’s now becoming evident for those who didn’t believe it.

Before someone says “electrons are free so software should be too”, here’s few considerations to think about:

1. Developer’s time is not free
2. Your time is not free
3. Knowledge (education) is not free
4. Equipment (computers) is not free
5. Electrons are not actually free either (you still must pay for web hosting)
6. Nobody works for free unless someone else pays their bills (parents, for example)

So there’s really no point arguing on this. Lawyers don’t charge just for cost of a peace of paper, taxi drivers don’t charge just for a gas, professional football players don’t play for free, cars are not priced just on value of raw materials – the list can go on and on. So why then some people think that developers should charge just for a CD?

Of course, some free-to-use software will always exist, but in a long term, it must pay off in one way or another. Being it through  consulting and support (applicable for enterprise markets), advertisements, information access (various Google products), offering a premium version, or whatever works in a specific case.

So, people, you have no right to assume to get something for nothing – at least not forever…

In addition to an educational 30% discount, we have just announced a competitive discount of 20% or 40% (depending on product). We believe that this could be a nice opportunity to either switch to Web Log Storming or to use it as an additional analytics tool. You just need to send us a screen shot with a proof – it could be a picture of the About box with your name in it (if it’s a desktop solution) or a picture of a web page for a hosted solution.

For paid packages (either desktop or hosted) the discount is 40%, which means that you can get new Web Log Storming license for only $113.40 (US).

And this could surprise you. The discount is currently available even if you use free analytics package, but with an additional condition: you must use it for at least two months (make sure you set date range accordingly when taking a screen shot). In this case discount is 20% and your price would be $151.20 (US).

The offer is also available for the upgrade from old version of Web Log Storming ($47.40 / $63.20).

Visit Web Log Storming website for more information

In this article we are going to point out some objective strengths of web server log analysis compared to JavaScript based statistics, such is Google Analytics. Depending on your preferences and type of the website, you might find some or all of these arguments applicable or not. In any case, everyone should be at least aware of differences in order to make a right decision.

1. You don’t need to edit HTML code to include scripts

Depending on how your website is organized, this could be a major tasks, especially if it contains lot of static HTML pages. Adding script code to all of them will surely take time. If your website is based on some content management system with centralized design template, you’ll still need to be careful not to forget adding code to any additional custom pages outside this CMS.

2. Scripts take additional time to load

Regardless of what Google Analytics officials say, actual experiences prove otherwise. Scripts are scripts and they must take some time to load. If external file is located on a third-party server (as it’s the case with Google Analytics), the slowdown is even more noticeable, because visitor’s browser must resolve another domain.

As a solution they suggest putting inclusion code at the end of the page. Indeed, in that case it would appear that page is loaded more quickly, but the truth is that there’s a good chance that visitor will click another link before script is executed. As a result, you won’t see these hits in stats and they are lost forever.

3. If website exists, log files exist too

With JavaScript analytics, stats are available only for periods when code was included. If you forget to put code on some pages, the opportunity is forever lost. Similarly, if you decide to start collecting stats today, you’ll never be able to see stats from yesterday or before. Same applies to goals: metrics are available only after you decide to track them. With some log analyzers, you can freely add more goals anytime and still be able to analyze them based on log files from the past.

4. Server log files contain hits to all files, not just pages

By using solely JavaScript based analytics, you don’t have any information about hits to images, XML files, flash (SWF), programs (EXE), archives (ZIP, GZ), etc. Although you could consider these hits irrelevant, they are not for most webmasters. Even if you don’t usually maintain other types of files, you must have some images on your website, which could be linked from external websites without you knowing anything about it.

5. You can investigate and control bandwidth usage

Although you might not be aware of it, most hosting providers limit bandwidth usage and usually base their pricing on it. Bandwidth usage costs them and, naturally, it most probably costs you as well. You would be surprised how much domains (usually from third-world countries) poll your whole website on a regular basis, possibly wasting gigabytes of your bandwidth every day. If you could identify these domains, you could easily block their traffic.

6. Bots (spiders) are excluded from JavaScript based analytics

Similar as previous point, some (bogus) spiders misbehave and they are wasting your bandwidth, while you don’t have any benefit from them. In addition, server logs also contain information about visits from legitimate bots, such are Google or Yahoo. By using solely JavaScript based analytics you have no idea how often they come and which pages they visit.

7. Log files record all traffic, even if JavaScript is disabled

Certain percentage of users choose to turn off JavaScript, and some of them use browsers that don’t support it at all. These visits can’t be identified by JavaScript based analytics.

8. You can find out about hacker attacks

Hackers could attack your website with various methods, but neither of them would be recorded by JavaScript analytics. As every access to your web server is contained in log files, you are able to identify them and save yourself from damage (by blacklisting their domains or closing security holes on your website).

9. Log files contain error information

Without them, in general case, you don’t have any information about errors and status codes (such are Page not found, Internal server error, Forbidden, etc.). Without it, you are missing possible technical problems with your website that lower overall visitor’s perception of its quality. Moreover, any attempt to access forbidden areas of your website can be easily identified.

10. By using log file analyzer, you don’t give away your business data

And last but not least, your stats are not available to a third-party who can use them at their convenience. Google has bought all rights for, at that time, popular and quite expensive web statistics product (Urchin), repackaged it, and then allowed to anyone to use it for free. The question is: why? They surely get something in return, as Google Analytics license agreement allows them to use your information for their purposes, and even to share it with others if you choose to participate in sharing program.

What could they possibly use? Just to give few obvious ideas: tweaking AdWords minimum bids, deciding how to prioritize ads, improving their services (and profits) – all based on traffic data collected from you and others.

Related links

Busting the Google Analytics Mythbuster
Which web log analyzer should I use?
What price Google Analytics? (by Dave Collins)
Web Log Storming – an interactive web log analyzer

In our last post we have asked if anyone else suspects that we have received error report without his permission. So far, no one reported it yet and, as we have committed to extensive testing, we have all reasons to believe that it’s not a bug in our system that caused this unfortunate event but an isolated incident (although we are still open to any feedback that could suggest otherwise).

What happened is most surely an unintentional and accidental confirmation by this user who complained. Nevertheless, we apologize for the inconvenience to anyone who might have experienced same thing. Also, anyone who sent us a bug report is and always was informed about what’s happening: by window that shows sending progress and by information message box that stays on screen until users closes it. In other words, there is no chance that you’ve sent a bug report without knowing it happened.

Regardless, we are doing whatever is reasonable in order to reduce a possibility that this ever happens again, hopefully to zero. Firstly, because of your peace of mind and, secondly, because of our own peace of mind. After several iterations we finally settled down with this layout:

We are confident that the possibility of accidental error submission is now completely eliminated. As you can see, the Send button is disabled and it will remain so until you enter a valid Email address or click on I want to submit this error anonymously check box. We have also emphasized details about the whole process that will some users surely find important (such are statements about confidentiality, purpose and method of sending).

Update is already uploaded to the server, so feel free to download it.

Recently we had an unpleasant communication with one of our users who claims that our application sent an error report to us without his consent. Needless to say, we really take a special care about your privacy from the day one of our existence, avoiding any “sneaky” practices that lot of companies utilized until few years ago, when they still weren’t illegal. Ethics is and was the first law that we choose to oblige to.

That’s why this kind accusations immediately raised our alarm and we started to test our bug reporting routine in order to find and fix this misbehavior as soon as possible. However, all our tests went fine and we couldn’t reproduce the problem this user is referring to.

Regardless of that, we have left open the possibility that there’s either a bug or a misunderstanding causing this, and tried to get more information from him. Unfortunately, not just that he was not able to help, but his e-mails also contained some contrastive descriptions, let alone an attitude that was preventing any rational communication.

Considering that, and the fact that no one ever complained about this issue before, we would like to be sure: has any of our applications ever sent a bug report to us without your permission? If yes, please let us know as soon as possible so we can take further actions.

What’s error reporting?

“Hunting” bugs and crashes without any details is a “mission impossible”, as all that you get is a description like “Access violation at address 004E046E in module ‘Application.exe’. Read of address 000001B4.” or “Range check error”. With these alone we can’t do much – they barely inform us about error type and nothing else. That’s why any developer who’s serious about building a stable software intended for distribution to wide audience can’t imagine doing it without some error logging library, either built in-house or purchased from another vendor. For this purpose we use great EurekaLog.

These reports usually contain basic information that could affect program running: operating system with a version, amount of RAM, HDD, processor type and speed, running processes, etc. Most useful part of this report is a so called call stack, which shows us exactly in which function of our code problem occurred and what other functions invoked it. Also, there’s more information useful only to some types of applications: computer and user name, LAN IP address, etc. Sometimes, when call stack doesn’t suffice to locate an error, there’s a assembler code, computer register values, short memory content  (from this specific application) and, if user agrees, a screen shot.

How does it work in our applications?

As error reporting function should be and is completely voluntary, if error happens the first window that you see looks like this:

As you can see, there are two buttons at the bottom: “Send Error Report” and “Don’t Send“, so user has a clear choice to send it to us or not. There are also a two optional placeholders for your description and Email address (useful in case we have additional questions about the error).

In the middle of the window there’s also a “click here” link that you can use to inspect data this report contains before sending it. If you click on it, you’ll see a window like this:

At the left there are two checkboxes: “Send this error via Internet” and “Attach a Screenshot image“. By turning them off you can, once again, make a decision about sending. There’s also a convenient checkbox at the right (”Copy to Clipboard“), in case you want to send us error report manually by using your Email client (with some editing, if you wish).

It’s important to say that we don’t know who sent an error report, unless you explicitly leave us an Email address or name (in the first window) or send us a follow-up message pointing it out.

We hope that this article resolves any questions that our error reporting could raise, but feel free to contact us if you have any additional concerns.