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Visitor Marketing Made Easy

In many ways, Hit List should have placed second in the Comparison of tracking website visitor’s software, but its performance when processing our 80MB log file was six times slower than WebTrends’, which greatly affected its score. Nevertheless, we found that
Hit List offers an impressive set of reporting features and some management features that neither WebTrends nor NetIntellect offers, such as managing your log-file database, for example. Users are also given the ability to access and create reports remotely, which is a feature that the WebManage solution lacked.

Hit List also provides flexible reporting options, including path, trend, or iis log statistics analysis. Further, it was the only solution that allowed us to optimize, cycle, and update the entire log-file database. Performance was Hit List’s only drawback.

Although Marketwave officials identified Hit List Professional as its midrange solution, it was not designed to handle log files larger than 50MB, and as a result is best-suited for those sites generating an average number of hits that is less than 600,000.

Pros
(1) Database maintenance
(2) Flexible reporting options
(3) Wide range of log-file support
(4) Individual remote report access

Cons
(1) Slow performance when handling files larger than 50MB
(2) Must manually enter advertisements to be tracked

WebTrends, the market leader and a pioneer in visitor marketing, is the perfect solution for Web developers who want to get a better handle on providing a stable environment for their company’s Web site. Of the three solutions we tested, it provided the most comprehensive set of features, including log-analysis reports to help you understand traffic patterns, its own link-analysis utility, proxy server analysis, and device management capabilities. For its well-rounded approach to Web site maintenance and its comprehensive analysis features, we awarded WebTrends a Test Center Hot Pick.

Priced at $599, WebTrends costs about twice as much as the others, but you also get twice as much, and it offers the greatest number of utilities of the three solutions we evaluated. In addition to its log- and link-analysis tools, WebTrends includes built-in utilities for monitoring whether devices are up and recovering devices that are down. For instance, should a Web server go down, WebTrends can be configured to reboot a designated machine, thus ensuring that your site is always available. When there are problems with devices, administrators can either be paged or sent an e-mail. This kind of support ensures that Webmasters can respond quickly to problems that can result in downtime, and that your customers are not trying to access your site and finding it unavailable for hours at a time, which is a good way to lose customers.

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