• Product: Funnel Web 4.0.1 and Funnel Web Enterprise 4.0.1
• Company: Active Concepts
• Web: http://www.activeconcepts.com
• Contact: sales@activeconcepts.com
• Category: Web Analysis
• Price: Funnel Web 4.0.1, $349 (electronic), $399 (box); Funnel Web Enterprise 4.0.1, $1149 (electronic), $1199 (box)
• Requirements: Power Mac with 10 MB free hard drive space
• OS X Plans: Coming Soon
• Rating:
  Funnel Web - 4.5 out of 5 bites from the Apple
  Funnel Web Enterprise - 4 out of 5 bites from the Apple

Every web designer has a million things to think about when planning and creating a website. Among those are:

• What should the look and feel be?
• What form of navigation should be used?
• What technologies should be implemented?
• What kind of content does the reader want?

Surveys, past experience, and plain old intuition will help answer a lot of those questions, but once the site is completed, options suddenly change. Now there is actual content and design in place and actual visitors can be used to determine success or failure of the design. However, direct visitor feedback can be difficult and expensive to collect, not to mention intrusive.

For these reasons, among others, web analysis tools have boomed in importance because they can tell a designer so much about the site and the people that visit it without a lot of legwork for the designer and without taking any more information from the surfer than their browser is already giving out. Active Concepts offers one of the most comprehensive packages for breaking down that information: Funnel Web.

Browsers love to give away information... what kind of machine you have, what browser you are using, what pages you've visited, and more. Add that to the fact that the very nature of the Internet and it's usage of numerical addresses for identification lends itself to identifying geographical regions and providers, and you soon understand that there is a lot of info floating around waiting to be harvested.

This is where log files come in. Every web server is equipped to record visitor information into handy text files. The information included depends on the server software and the configuration. Funnel Web is designed to utilize all of this information, especially the extended information that can be retrieved when using Apache, WebStar, and Netscape servers (among others).

An example of a log file.

This is what Funnel Web and Funnel Web Enterprise are for. Active concepts says:

Funnel Web Enterprise is the ultimate solution for medium-sized, enterprise-level eCommerce sites. Enterprise gives companies detailed insight into client usage patterns, market penetration and online advertising effectiveness. Faster than competing products, this powerful Web profiling tool provides sophisticated charting and profiling of online activity across servers sites. Funnel Web's easy-to-read and use graphs and charts enable rapid interpretation of server performance and client usage. Streaming media analysis, speed, intuitive user interface, accuracy and in-depth analysis make Funnel Web the intelligent choice for enterprise-wide Web auditing.

Funnel Web 4.0 is the fastest, most accurate way to track and profile your Web site activity. This powerful analysis tool was designed to provide you with all the information you need to help you optimize the effectiveness of your online investment. Funnel Web gives insight into everything from server load to customer buying patterns and Intranet activity. It allows you to gain essential feedback on visitor behavior and preferences so you can customize your site to meet your clients needs.

Of course the first step towards interpreting all of this data is to install Funnel Web. I hasten to include this step because it almost isn't a step. I installed the electronic versions of both Funnel Web and Enterprise (both available at a $50 discount over the boxed versions) pretty quickly and easily: double click on the installer... read the legal stuff... and pick the location for installation. The electronic versions are actually downloaded as demos -- a great idea that a lot more companies are trying since it allows you to download the demo,try it out, then plug in the serial number after you buy it and have a fully functioning application without any more mess. In short, the installation process was just as any Mac application should be... utterly painless.

Configuring Funnel Web is another story altogether... sorta. You see, you can run Funnel Web "right out of the box" pretty much by dropping the log file onto the application icon and watching it go. It will use it's default configurations to create an HTML report to be located in the "Reports" folder. Open the index file and you have your basic stats! Configuring beyond that point isn't so much difficult, as it is complicated, because there are so many options to choose from.

While two separate packages, essentially Funnel Web and Funnel Web Enterprise are identical applications. It's just that Enterprise is the one with steroids that is designed for an entirely different audience. We'll touch upon that audience later, but first let's discuss the best features that both standard Funnel Web and Funnel Web Enterprise share:

Hits, requests, bandwidth, and history - these are the most basic features, and those that every web analysis tool should have. This tells you information on how many pages were accessed, the amount of information downloaded and uploaded, the frequency each visitor came by and for how long. Take a look at the image below

A snippet from a report.

As you can see, this information is taken from a log file with data for just one day. In this case, the site had 469 unique visitors that day and a total of 823 visits. Those visitors loaded 1,355 individual web pages and downloaded over 133 MB of information from the server (pages, files, pictures, etc.). As you can see, there is a ton of information that is now in readable form. And there's lots more too...

Traffic Trends - Just as important as the final numbers, are the traffic trends. When in the day do your visitors come: During the day while at work or in the Evening at home? When during the week and month do they visit? Can you link a spike or a dip in visits to a specific event? The more you can glean from your log, the better you can serve your visitors.

Hourly trends for site visits.

Demographics - Combine your traffic information with what you know about your visitor... What country are they visiting from? Are they from a .edu or a .com? Just how many US Government employees are visiting your site, when they should be working?

Diagnostics - What good is a great site, if it doesn't all work. Funnel Web features diagnostics reports that show broken links to specific pages and images. It's a lot easier to track down broken links if you know what you are looking for. Of course, you can also view the diagnostic trends over time.

Referrals - Who is linking to you? Find out if search engines are your biggest source of new surfers, or whether you have gotten the attention of another established site who is funneling viewers your way. Knowing who is linking to you helps when deciding who to target when designing public relations strategies.

Systems - What browser and Operating System are they using? If over half of your visitors are using IE 5 for Mac, it might be a good idea to make sure that your site renders perfectly on it or risk alienating many visitors. Likewise, if a large proportion of your readers are surfing on a UNIX console, it might be time you take a look on your site with one.

Marketing - Keep track of how many pages your visitors check out, how long they stay, and how many times they come back. This information is critical when determining whether you have successfully designed your site to keep your viewers on your domain.

So What's In Enterprise?

Of course, the features above may be enough for most users, but Enterprise offers more information from your log file:

Mean Paths - This shows you the route traveled through your site on average. This is most important to determine what your viewers are looking for and how they go about finding it. This is great for planning advertising and linking strategies.

Session Depth - compares how long people are on your site to how many pages are viewed. This information can tell you much more than you could get by looking just at how long a visitor averages on your site or how many pages are viewed. This keeps track of all of it for you.

Circulation - important for Marketing reasons, this shows you how often a visitor comes to your site. Along with reading loyalty and time online (available with Funnel Web 4), you get a more complete picture of why your visitors are coming.

Virtual Domain Support - Funnel Web 4.0 supports Virtual Domains for up to 10 domains, while Enterprise has no limit. This can be critical for very large sites, but for smaller sites, this feature may not matter at all.

Advertising - With Enterprise, you can create Advertising campaigns. Identify banner ads along with their costs and descriptions and keep track of their effectiveness. And keep track of ads on your own site to keep track of impressions and clickthroughs. This is a great feature with one exception -- I couldn't paste information into this section. Whether this is a bug in the software or just a function that they haven't thought of yet, it needs to be added (or fixed) as soon as possible. Most of my ad URL links are long and can't easily be manually typed in.

Active Concepts has created a site to describe every feature and compare the two versions. I definitely suggest that you view over this site if you need to determine which version is for you. Of course, a demo of both the regular and Enterprise version are available here.

With so many options available, one of the most important features is customization. With Funnel Web (both versions), you can customize your reports to include just what you want:

• Create reports for a specific date, or week, or month.
• Create multiple reports from a single log file.
• Add or remove features to your report.
• Save report in HTML, PDF, Excel, Word formats and more.
• Chose one of nine languages for your report.
• Filter out specific URLs, Clients, Errors and more.

Along with the ability to customize your reports, you can organize and schedule the process itself. With Funnel Web, you can schedule log file downloads, chose where they are saved and even delete them off of the server as necessary. Then go ahead and schedule when reports will be made. Funnel Web can be setup to run constantly for you whether you are there to monitor it or not.

Some customization features

I was a bit disappointed with the manual. First, from within Funnel Web, selecting "Online Help" from the Help menu takes you to the Active Concepts website and the online manual which is only updated to version 3.7! While an updated manual can be found on the site, I wasn't able to get to it directly from the online manual linked to from within the program. I also couldn't get Funnel Web to find the "offline manual" a PDF file that is sitting inside the Funnel Web folder.

As for the manual itself, the PDF file included is very thorough and as long as you are familiar with the Acrobat format, you should be very comfortable with it. On the Active Concepts website, is also a feature for searching within an HTML version of the manual... which seems to work fairly well, except that the manual is divided between setup and reporting... meaning that you need to view two separate pages for setting the program out and understanding the output.

While I expect a rather large majority of this review's readers to be using Macs, and who's only concern is that the software is available for Macs, other platform choices is an important concern. Platform flexibility is huge for demonstrating market strength and cross compatibility with others you may work with. Funnel Web 4.0.1 and Enterprise are both available for Windows and Mac, coming soon to Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X. Version 3.7 is currently available for Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris.

Final Analysis

Both the standard and Enterprise versions of Funnel Web are feature full and aside from a few glitches, both worked great. Funnel Web Enterprise is definitely designed with features that most people will never need, but that's of course why they have a standard and pro version. I would definitely suggest Funnel Web with it's affordable $349-$399 price range for most site owners. However, I can't give as much of a thumbs up for Enterprise. For one, it's expensive at over three times the cost of it's sibling, for a relatively small number of features. If you've looked at the "comparison page" linked to earlier, then you would notice that several of the great Enterprise features won't be available until version 4.1. At that time, the exceptional cost differential may be worth it, but until then, most of you may want to stay clear. Of course, both products get major bonus points for having fully functional, 30 day limited, demos. If you try out either demos, and have a full month to play with them, you will know more than by just reading this review, whether Funnel Web is right for you. Have at it!

Marc Messer