By David Strom
(appeared in Infoworld 2/17/97)
Just like you can purchase clothes off the rack or direct from the Paris haute-couture runways, there are varying degrees of web server analysis tools. Interse's Market Focus is more in the latter category with a price tag that approaches a custom-made LaRenta gown.
The comparison is appropriate, because Market Focus has many different things that will need attending to before you can find the perfect fit to your needs. There is a great deal inside this product, and it will take some work on your part to bring it out.
Before you do anything you first have to review the various bits and pieces of documentation that come on the CD ROM -- these Word files will tell you exactly the configuration and additional software that you'll need. Ignore them, as I initially did, and you'll suffer. For example, I was running with Word 97, which turned out to be a mistake -- Market Focus only supports Word 7 for its reports. Besides Word, you can output its reports in HTML format as well as Excel and plain text.
Once you make it through this hurdle, you'll then need to create your databases and populate them with data collected from your web server. Unlike simpler programs such as WebTrends, Market Focus doesn't automatically recognize the log format of your web server -- you'll have to specify this and several other parameters at import time. This was a big stumbling block for me, given that there are close to 30 different log file formats to choose from.
Finally, you need to setup and run various analysis modules to aggregate your data and create your reports. This is the product's strength -- you can combine separate log files from different time periods, servers, and situations (for example, if you have one log file that records advertising impressions while another records overall hits) in any number of combinations.
Each of these modules (import, analyze, and reporting) runs independently of the other and has a carefully documented sequence of steps required. Perform these steps out of order or forget one, and you'll get garbage or worse somewhat inaccurate reports. I used previous reports generated by WebMapper and WebTrends to benchmark the results from Market Focus -- of course, none of their numbers agreed with each other precisely, frustrating my efforts.
I could overlook many of these speed bumps in getting setup, but I feel that analyzing your web server shouldn't be a full-time occupation, and therefore the software tools should be somewhat easy to figure out. Market Focus is way too complex. Plus, there are some bugs and sloppiness -- for example, the printed reports were still labeled with a version 2 heading rather than version 3. And I would periodically crash the Import module and have to kill it off with NT's Task Manager before continuing. You would expect better from software that costs as much as a good used car.
Speaking about price, you can see from the databox that just figuring out the price tag is an effort -- there are more options than on a '57 Chevy. The base model works with Access' .mdb format, although you don't need to use Access at all. More expensive options work with SQL Server and Oracle formatted-databases, which you'll want to use if you want to do your own data analysis outside of Market Focus.
Once I got everything to work, the product has a wealth of reports that exceed what you would get from a strict log analysis tool, a web visualization tool (Market Focus creates the same cyberbolic picture that NetCarta's WebMapper displays), and a link checking tool.
I tested it on an NT Server v4.0 IBM Pentium model 365 PC, but Market Focus also runs on Windows 95 machines as well. You probably want to stick with NT, though, especially if you are going to be using SQL Server or Oracle databases.
If you only analyze a single web server once a month, this isn't the product for you. On the other hand, if you are running advertising on your web site and need to justify the number of click-throughs and impressions, or if you are trying to track multiple web servers and sites, then this product is worth its steep price.
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Sunnyvale Calif
408 732 0932
408 732 7038 fax
Price: Standard (single-server) edition ranges from $695 to $7,195, depending on the database server version used
Developer's edition ranges from $3,495 to $9,995, again depending on database server (analyze multiple servers and additional modules)
Upgrades from previous versions cost $145 to $4,197. Free to purchasers of version 2 after 11/1/96.
Platforms: Windows 95, Windows NT. Works with Microsoft Access, SQL Server and Oracle databases, which must be purchased separately.