SmarterStats is a complete Web log analytics tool that cost-effectively delivers relevant, accurate, and detailed statistics for a single website or tens of thousands of websites across a distributed network. SmarterStats provides a complete solution by offering support for many log file types (e.g., Internet Information Server (IIS), Apache, etc.) and support for multiple operating systems such as Windows and Linux. The unique methodology in which SmarterStats interprets log files and converts them into an efficient, proprietary, relational database that reduces disk space utilization up to 85% while creating an ideal platform for reporting and extensive data mining.
- Would you like to analyze performance relative to marketing campaigns and SEO efforts?
- Would you like to understand what search engines are indexing?
- Would you like to understand what pages people are spending the most and least time on?
- Would you like to measure true visitor traffic without spider and bot pollution?
- Would you like to analyze your website for performance and which pages are processing longer?
- Would you like to understand the path visitors took through your website during their visit?
- Would you like to accurately track back to the pages that brought visitors to your website?
- Do you want to answer these questions and more with robust data mining?
SmarterStats delivers an industry-leading Web interface to access all the functionality of this complete Web analytics solution. Whether you are a system administrator or an individual website owner managing one website, a Web browser is all you need. The SmarterStats interface is optimized with Silverlight™ charts and graphs, AJAX controls, snapping panes, right mouse click support, keyboard shortcuts, and other intuitive user controls—bringing the features and performance of a desktop application to the Web.
SmarterStats utilizes the STInterfaceFramework, which allows for the custom skinning of the application and can be incorporated across the SmarterTools product line—saving substantial time and money on a unified company appearance.
The effectiveness of SmarterStats begins with its ability to differentiate “real traffic” from traffic generated by spiders and bots. SmarterStats adds detailed summary and trend reporting with nearly one hundred report items to help businesses understand real traffic to improve the results of marketing campaigns and to better understand visitor habits. To enhance Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts, SmarterStats provides over twenty report items designed to measure spider and bot activity patterns for improved performance on all major search engines.
Unlike most competing products, SmarterStats includes the ability to data mine and drill down into individual Web pages, user activity, IP addresses, paths, and more—which can be correlated into insightful results (e.g., most popular product, marketing campaign, referring website). In addition, geographic analysis, report items, and mapping are available by country, state, province, and city.
As much as 15% of the traffic on larger sites—and up to 50% of the traffic on smaller sites—may be directly related to automated hits generated by spiders and bots as they index a website. Unlike many competing analytics tools, SmarterStats separates real traffic from spider and bot traffic. The ability to identify real trends and habits will allow individuals and large organizations to make effective marketing decisions.
The success or failure of a website is directly correlated to search engine performance. The ability to isolate and separate spider traffic gives individuals the power to see into search engine methods (e.g. Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live, and Ask). SmarterStats users can effectively and accurately determine what pages are being indexed and when—maximizing SEO for greater visibility and better conversion rates. SmarterStats provides twenty report items specifically tailored to address these issues.
SmarterStats provides the ability to visually see website performance graphically and to allow the identification of markets across borders and without boundaries. Geographic analysis, report items, and mapping are available at the country, state, province, and city level—identifying demographic opportunities.
SmarterStats provides the ability to further tailor reports through filtering. Report items that you have tailored can also be assigned as a Favorite—to be quickly referenced in the future. Report items and Favorites can be combined into custom reports that address a specific need (e.g. organizational summary report, executive report). Standard reports, custom reports, and Favorites can be scheduled and distributed to individuals or groups through email to reduce administration. In addition, SmarterStats report data can be exported to Microsoft Excel™ and other tools for additional examination.
Unique to SmarterStats is the ability to reprocess imported log data repeatedly as new reports are added to SmarterStats or to reflect exclusion and/or additions as you refine your metrics. With competing products, new reports only provide results from the moment the report is made available. SmarterStats allows the reprocessing of existing log data over any time frame so that website owners can see future reports on yesterday’s data.
Data Mining
Data Mining—normally available only to large enterprises and often requiring expensive software applications—is a process of organizing and sorting large amounts of data to isolate information relevant to a specific circumstance or business need. SmarterStats brings the power of data mining into an efficient, cost-effective tool accessible to individual website owners, yet powerful enough to handle the requirements of large enterprises. The SmarterStats implementation of data mining is an invaluable method to unlock the answers to complex questions.
To reduce the complexity often associated with data mining, SmarterStats presents data mining in an intuitive point-and-click fashion. Through the use of questions, such as: “What are the most popular entry pages that people have used when accessing a particular file?” website owners are able to better determine the effectiveness of marketing efforts by evaluating users who have purchased and what page(s) they entered on. A number of different data mining questions are available and more are continually added.
Data mining in SmarterStats does not require special planning or separate reporting. Website owners can instantly drill down into existing reports by selecting individual report elements from established or custom reports to gain deeper insight into individual pages and visits.
Architecture
The SmarterStats architecture allows for multiple installation methods. For single websites, a desktop computer can access log files locally or remotely through FTP, UNC, and SAMBA on Windows and Linux servers. For larger companies or Hosting environments, the Enterprise edition adds remote agents for distributed architectures. Agents analyze log files remotely, allowing a single SmarterStats server to manage and report on up to 30,000 websites across an unlimited number of servers.
SmarterStats has been developed to be highly efficient and to run alongside other applications while processing log files transparently—without affecting the performance of the local computer or server. SmarterStats is highly configurable and can be adjusted to increase the speed in which websites are analyzed or balanced to mitigate any system impact. Historically, Web log analytics tools have been associated with heavy system overhead and instability problems. SmarterStats has effectively eliminated these concerns through the use of proprietary compression techniques, distributed processing, and the adoption of the .Net 3.5 framework.
SmarterStats is cost-effective and increases performance over competing products by employing a highly efficient and proprietary database. As SmarterStats imports log files, the data is converted and compressed into the SmarterStats relational database—achieving up to an 85% reduction in disk space requirements. It is no longer necessary to store or archive log files because SmarterStats can regenerate them—or reproduce them in other supported formats.
Administration
SmarterStats includes Web-based administration that allows administrators to manage all actions from one convenient interface—at the system and website level. Industry-leading Web services (SOAP/API) allow for the automation of administrative functions and integration with a wide variety of control panels and other applications. Administrators can easily see the performance of servers across their entire network, the status of individual websites, bandwidth utilization, and much more. In addition, SmarterStats includes time-saving features such as the mass propagation of settings across servers and websites as well as the ability to conduct single-click website migrations from one server to another.
SmarterStats was built from the ground up for ease of administration and automation in businesses and hosting environments. Web services allow for custom (internal development) or existing applications (control panels, etc.) to create efficiencies and reduce costs by performing automated actions, such as:
- Adding sites
- Determining website-specific bandwidth usage for billing
- Setting details on specific websites
- Would you like to measure true visitor traffic without spider and bot pollution?
- Migrating a website between servers
- Updating website information
- Testing services added to the Web interface
- Much more....
SmarterStats helps system administrators to maintain, archive, and purge log files and analytic data. Convenient settings allow for the regularly scheduled deletions of log files and older SmarterStats data on user-defined intervals—saving time and money.
Larger organizations and hosting environments can distribute control to individual website owners, department heads, or customers—allowing them to view reports, add users to a website, set report filtering, export log files to other formats, reprocess statistics, and more—all without requiring the assistance of system administrators.