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Home > Commentary > Trends Archive > Packet Sniffing for Web Analytics: Not dead yet

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Report Excerpt

The Web Analytics Report 2009 looks at... Mapping human-readable values in Auriq reports

"A helpful “Mapping Function” enables administrators to change default field values -- such as extracting a user ID from a cookie, extracting query string data, eliminating unwanted pages, changing URLs to plain language titles, and splitting attributes in queries (e.g., product and model). This work will surely enhance report usability, but you need to perform it upfront before implementation. Unfortunately, AuriQ provides no error checking utility that could check the accuracy of the data entered, leaving you to conduct potentially time-sapping QA on all the values. For example, if you want to extract user IDs from cookies, you'll have to perform a visual sanity check or run a script to ensure that all of the IDs have been extracted."

(p. 203)

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- - Anil Batra,
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TrendWatch Blog

Packet Sniffing for Web Analytics: Not dead yet

23-Jul-2007   --  

You could be excused for thinking that packet sniffing-based data collection for Web Analytics was long gone. Packet sniffing -- or network-based data collection -- was the basis of web analytics pioneer Accrue Software's technology in the mid '90s, but like log file analysis, it fell out of favor at least in the US market with the advent of page tag-based data collection.

Proponents argue that packet sniffing is superior because data collection becomes "hands off" once the collection appliance is installed between the router and network switch. There are no tags to maintain, nor log files to administer. On the other hand, if a data collector fails, you have not data.

So, what if you want to consider using a packet sniffing solution? You won't find this data collection method available from major North American vendors anymore, but there are potential alternatives.

RTmetrics by AuriQ deployed their packet sniffing solution in 1996 and has established its presence in the Japanese market, among others. The company has headquarter offices both in Tokyo and Los Angeles. CCMedia, a Taiwanese company founded in 1999, is also committed to the packet sniffing technology, and recently opened a US office in San Jose. And finally, Metronome Labs, based in Pittsburgh, integrates its network data collection solution with the Webabacus Analytics solution sold by the UK's Foviance.

- Submitted by: Phil Kemelor, Contributing Analyst

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