When interpreting your web statistics becomes
an easy task with the proper data mining tools

   If you invested a lot of time and money in your web site, getting the proper tools to know who are your visitors and what they do should be the next step. Many statistical packages exist on the Internet, but their quality varies greatly. Regarding log analyzers, most free packages will give you a rough picture but in general they fail to separate correctly spiders & other scripts from human visitors. Some page tagging (hosted web analytics) solutions like Google Analytics or MS AdWord Analytics are doing a better job, but page tagging systems have some intrinsic flaws:

• Privacy and security not garenteed. Your web statistics and the behaviour or your visitors are available to the web analytics provider and some other companies with whom this information is shared. .
• Downloads, hits on images and bandwith usage are not available.Hosted web analytics solutions can only track accessed pages where you inserted their tracking tags. Generally you have no reliable statistics rearding zip, pdf, videos or music files.
• Error Codes. If the requested page is not found or if any other error occurs, the web analytics provider cannot detect this; such information is recorded in your log file however.
• Visitors whose browser does not support javascript are ignored. In some companies the browser of every employee is set to not support javascript for security reasons. Spiders and Robots (like Inktomi) are also undetected for the same reason. On the other hand in both cases such events are recorded in your log file.
• You need to insert the relevant tags in the pages that you want to track.

  But hosted web analytics have also some advantages; for example GA can give you the CPC or even the age and gender of your visitors in some cases. This is why Expert Data Miner was designed to be compatible with hosted web analytics solutions. With a small modification to your server setup, you can even re-use the cookies of Google Analytics or many other packages and get them into your log files. Potential differences between the results of both systems are explained in details on this site or the help file.

In addition to the above points, Expert Data Miner offers many other advantages over page tagging systems and other log analyzers:

• Drill down approach: In many reports you have just to right click on a line to get several graphs or the behaviour of your visitors individually. This can be incredibly usefull when you wish to get a detailed picture and know exactly what happened. .
• Custom coluns and filters: The set of filters is very rich and you can combine several filters with an AND/OR condition. You can also decide exactly what you want in your reports, create columns from scratch, or remove the columns or the reports that you don't need.
• Custom modifications: If EDM is doing 90% of what you want but still wish to get one or two extra reports, the system can be modified by ASCO IT at a quite affordable cost. You will never get this from software giants like Google or Microsoft.
• Unique extra reports: Several of the current reports do not exist in any other software. The help file contains concrete examples if you wish to know how to materialize this into a profit. Wether you sell music, books, financial services or online articles, you can build your own reports and isolate the most interesting prospects to contact or predict the future trend.
• The data is available almost instantaneously, not one day after.
• EDM is much easier to use when you want to plot one variable against another and find an explanation.

Back to the main page