Tracking Software for SEO/SEM?

What is everyone's preference when it comes to tracking software. What are you using to find out if your Google SEO is working or not beyond just serps?

It would be great to have one that:

- tracked hits, time on page, where they came from... (the basics)
- plus what kw are converting into sales and tracking that customers future sales and all the cool advanced reports and SEM/promo campaign tracking

It would be great to find a cheap one that may be missing some bells and whistles and one does it all and isn't the most expensive one out there either. Then I could recommend one or the other to people depending on budget and need.

For my site I'm using www.statcounter.com which is a professional looking site with good features, free and invisible. If anyone else is looking for software I found a list of these programs, but would like recommendations.

thanks

I like webtrends. This online stuff is unreliable!

Raw logfiles + database + a good programmer can easily work out an amazing (custom) application that gives a whole lot more than any out-of-box app.

There are certain things good Web stats programs can give you over the log file.

I will be writing a review on Urchin 5.5 and posting the article here and in other SEO/SEM content sites.

I will go through the feature set, what us SEO/SEMs like and what the software lacks.

I picked Urchin for many reasons and I think it will help the SEO/SEM in the long run.

More to come soon...

I looked into Urchin too but haven't messed around with it yet. Anyone know the key differences between Urchin and Webtrends??? Pros and Cons??

-PK

2k that was a rather php monger response ;)

Awstats is decent.. anything that parses log files themselves. Depends on your budget as well.. anymore info of systems you have, IIS/Apache/Budgets you have to follow would help this answer along.

For rankings search engine commando (not affiliated)
For statistics webtrends live and log analyser (expensive but I really need it.)

I have been looking into this on WMW as well and found a rather indepth discussion of tracking. Basically the conclusion over there is that no matter how you do it, you won't get perfect accuracy so take your results with a grain of salt. Lots of other good discussion espesially for you programmers.

Here is their discussion- http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum39/1746.htm

There seemed to be 3 main ways of technically going about this, so maybe we should discuss this before picking a software package.

-log file analysis (seems to be voted least accurate as it includes nonhuman stats <bots,spiders,etc>)
-cookies (more and more ppl shutting cookies off)
-session ids (didn't I read that this bad for SEO)

Which is the best format?

I appreciate the program it yourself path, but I hesitate to end up in the nightmare of overbudget and overdeadline projects or clients asking for more and more features that hold the marketing up. Maybe as a non-programmer, I'm assuming it's a bigger deal than it is.




:-?

Well the benefit of Urchin is the it uses both log files and cookies to track sessions. The software resides on your server so its 1st party cookies unlike these 3rd party cookies which pose security risks.

It does an amazing job of showing you organic results and matching the organic to transactions.

I just read an article from Inc. Magazine about a few companies who use the web in their business and one was a magic shop that said they used Urchin for $5/month provided through their webhoster. They also said they were gonna move on to webtrends because it had more advanced reporting freatures.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/2003110...ingwonders.html

I seen that Urchin says something about so many $$ for 100 sites. Does that mean I can buy the software and rent it out to 100 other site owners? That must be what her hosting company is doing.

I pull the raw logfiles from the server and inserts them inoto a database combined with other relevant information for the site in question. Having it on a SQL-database makes it easy to anything I want. On certain sites the logs are complimeted with information regarding the spesific user. Did you know that the typical new adult paysite signup is female and between 30-35 years of age.

I've been really happy with WebTrends over the years for web log reporting...

- Shawn

I use webtrends alwell and am happy. I do use an offline log analyzer aswell just to be sure. I dont think one piece of software will do the job so an average from two or three apps works for me.

-PK

I have very little experience with Web trends.

Rusty they offer a 14 day trial in case your wondering. Urchin looks good but webtrends does seem to have more features (if you need them is a different story)

But Urchin new SVG (super vector graphix) graph system looks fun

-PK