Getting to the point related to web analytics, it is so important to validate reports, when possible, against another data source.  This topic is addressed from an Omniture SiteCatalyst perspective in this excellent blog post at The Omni Man blog.  Enjoy the read; let me know your reaction, or if I can help you better understand your web analytics results.

Now more than ever it is important to monitor web server activity by reviewing http access files and event logs. Take a moment and review the various logfiles in your environment as soon as possible.  Recently I reviewed a site’s logs and realized that one page of the site was under constant attack from overseas. It wasn’t long before this constant traffic turned into a DDoS attack which was easily stopped by blocking the origin IPs. What started out as casual, routine log review became a task with a serious outcome.  Let me know your thoughts and experiences!

June Dershewitz provided this excellent short post at her web analytics blog to help those who know Omniture and need to learn Webtrends, and vice-versa.  Specifically, she’s writing about migrating between the two packages, but there’s great info for anyone who ‘grew up’ using one package before learning the other.

…

Update: (2/2010) – evidently someone at SEOmz read my ink cartridge remark, because they’ve reworked their content to by much more friendly. Cheers!

First, let’s see how Bing identifies itself as a referring site in your logfiles:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=querystring_here&FORM=MSNH11

Nothing too fancy here.   The fully specified domain name and query string value is here. I’m not yet too sure about the ‘FORM=MSNH11′ value – I am sure it is a useful item yet to be discovered.

Google Analytics
I know that Google Analytics (GA) will allow users to add new search engines with a special API call that you need to add after the first pageTracker() call:

pageTracker._addOrganic("bing.com","q");

What is not clear is if this call should be made only once, or if it should remain part of your tagging at least until GA reports Bing data on its own. More on this later.  Somehow I suspect Google will be a bit lackadasical about adding a competing search engine to is reports.

Omniture
SiteCatalyst appears to report on Bing referrals just fine. It nicely displays as ‘Microsoft Bing’ instead of just ‘Bing’. This will help SiteCatalyst users make the transition visually.

Webtrends
The WebtrendsOutsider blog has documented how to update self-hosted Webtrends installations to report Bing data properly. For users running a custom keywords.ini file, this post explains how to make the update.  For users running the ‘factory’ keywords.ini and browser.ini files, just hop over to Webtrends and pick up new versioned copies of both files and place them on your WT server.