Visitor counter script solutions can provide Web administrators with information critical to developing a successful Web site strategy, and midrange traffic analysis offerings can be particularly helpful to companies that are just beginning to experiment with this concept. In this Test Center Comparison, market leader WebTrends outperformed both the Marketwave and WebManage solutions with its namesake Professional Suite in most of the categories we evaluated. The WebTrends solution aims to provide the most comprehensive set of analysis and management features, and it succeeds — which is why we awarded it with a Test Center Hot Pick.

The fact that WebTrends costs twice as much as the other two solutions is offset by the fact that it offers capabilities for managing devices that the other solutions do not offer, including monitoring and alerting utilities. However, if extensive management capabilities are not a priority for your company, either of the competing solutions will provide Web administrators with a more affordable means of gathering general information about Web site visitors and iis statistics software, and will be well-suited to sites that generate modest levels of traffic.

In any case, companies will inevitably look to the higher-end offerings available from each of the vendors included in this Comparison, because those solutions will be more viable when it comes to managing heavy Web site traffic, larger visitor marketing files, and lengthier, more detailed reports.

We awarded WebTrends with a Hot Pick primarily because it provides Web administrators with more device and program management features than do either of its competitors, making it a better solution for site maintenance and traffic analysis. Moreover, its link-analysis utility, Site Manager, gave the market-leading Linkbot Pro, from Tetranet Software, a run for its money during our tests. Although Linkbot Pro fared better than Site Manager in terms of usability and navigation to broken links and damaged pages, Site Manager offered a wider variety of Web site viewing options and even made recommendations for improving our site; Linkbot Pro did not. In terms of performance, WebTrends gave us no trouble when running our reports using the reverse DNS lookup feature, which was not the case with its competitors. WebTrends offered the most extensive analysis capabilities, drilling down to minute detail in its reports, which were attractively presentation-ready.

Pros

(1) Complete, all-in-one solution
(2) Fairly fast processing
(3) Highly detailed log-file analysis
(4) Widest variety of management utilities
(5) Easy-to-read, polished reports

Cons

(1) Must manually enter advertisements to be tracked
(2) Twice as expensive as its competitors