By Karen Rodriguez World Wide Web sites handling several
hundred thousand hits per day have maxed out on the usage analysis tools
that came to market just six months ago.
In many instances, the time it takes to generate reports
that process gigabytes of data is much too long.
Products from Interse Corp. (www.interse.com) and other
companies were built to use the Web server log for gathering statistics,
which are then imported into a database for further analysis. But the transfer
from the server to database can take longer than five hours for several
gigabytes of usage data.
And in the case of usage analysis services, such as Internet
Profiles Corp., or I/Pro (www.ipro.com), and NetCount LLC (www.netcount.com)
the reports from data gathered in a single day's Web site activities may
not be returned for several days.
A newcomer to the usage analysis tool market, Andromedia
Inc. (www.andromedia.com), is offering a beta version of its Aria product,
which is aimed at high-volume sites, such as Pathfinder, that want to turn
their Web sites into a strategic marketing tool. The Andromedia tool will
ship this fall.
K2 Design Inc. (www.k2design.com), which builds Web sites
for corporations, announced it will integrate Andromedia's Aria systems
into its suite of services and product offerings.
"Andromedia's solution can especially handle greater
volumes of data, and because the information is put into a database real-time,
it's tracking real visitors, not inferred visitors," says Leslie Howard,
vice president of product development at K2 Design, in New York.
"The other systems out there today are built to
track hits, and now advertisers are interested in looking at visitors and
page views," says Howard. "We need more information, such as
navigational path, what time is spent where and activity on an individual
basis, so then we can aggregate up to get overall statistics. If organizations
spend $20,000 on a Web site, they want to make sure it works."
The Aria Recorder is a server based data management engine
that captures messages from the Aria.Monitor on the Web server, such as
cookie profiles or form field data, and passes them in real-time in the
server's object database.
The recorder serves as a generic database engine that
can be used with a variety of applications.
Through Aria application programming interfaces, or APIs,
companies can use existing applications, such as NetGravity Inc.'s (www.netgravity.com)
AdServer or I/Pro's I/Audit software, and other custom applications, to
capture and manage data on visitors, navigation patterns, Web content and
advertising.
So for example, a market research company could use the
Aria Recorder to collect data from member companies' Web sites and aggregate
the various reports.
Another benefit to using Aria is that the API allows
K2 to integrate third party data into the report.
For example, K2 can combine a user's Internet Protocol,
or IP address and domain name with InterNIC's geographic IP roster to nail
down the specific location of a visitor.
Another option is for K2 to let its clients in the database
marketing business cross-reference user information obtained from the user's
browser with Dun & Bradstreet's standard industry codes.
The drawback is that in order to take advantage of Aria's
high-performance system, which is said to process 80 to 180 transactions
per second, an organization must run the software on a four-processor Sun
Microsystems Inc. Sparcstation and not an ordinary Unix or Windows NT system.