WebTrends 8.0d Download Now Available

WebTrends as of last Friday released 8.0d. This version contains the batch for daylight savings time plus a few other minor bug fixes.

I'm in the process of downloading it and as usual either WebTrends is swamped with downloads (which I doubt) or they are once again throttling the download speed. I'm on a high speed connection and barely getting dial-up download speeds.

Oh well,

Here is the link for all of you: ftp://ftp.webtrends.com/WRC/80d/wt-windows.exe

WebTrends & Day Light Savings Time

Great article from WebTrends on what you need to do before this weekends change to Day Light Savings time here in North America.

Basically you don't need to do anything if you're running your profiles with the default settings. However, if you are using the custom time zone settings, you need to apply a patch.

The article references WebTrends 8.0d, but a check of their download site does not show a version 8.0d being available. My guess is that the patch is the equivalent, unfortunately the article is a bit vague on this.

What's interesting is that the patch became available on March 2, barely a week before needed. Yet given the formal policies in most organizations about applying patches to production servers, I expect many organizations won't have the patch in place on time.

I also find it surprising that WebTrends hasn't issued a notice of the patch and instead has relied on a message being displayed when you log into your WebTrends. Since many people ignore these WebTrends marketing messages I'm sure many organizations didn't even get the message that there is a patch available.

Search Engine Market Share Update

I want to thank Patrick G. an avid reader of my blog for pushing me to research and report on the latest market share for the different search engines.

Like you, I use this knowledge when concentrating my SEO efforts for specific search engines or for my ppc (Pay Per Click) search engine marketing efforts.

The last statistics I reported on were received from Google Canada itself. I haven't received an update lately, but I've found a few web sites that are reporting these numbers on a global basis.

So are some different latest snapshots:

Comscore
Share of Online Searches by Engine
December 2006 - January 2007
Total U.S. Home, Work and University Internet Users
Source: comScore qSearch

	Dec-06	Jan-07	Pt Chg vs. Previous Month
Total Internet Population	100%	100%	N/A
Google Sites	47.3	47.5	0.2
Yahoo! Sites	28.5	28.1	-0.4
Microsoft Sites	10.5	10.6	0.1
Ask Network	5.4	5.2	-0.2
Time Warner Network	4.9	5.0	0.1

If you're looking for global numer then take a look a these numbers from Netapplications.com (the numbers are based on traffic to the web sites they monitor).

Top 10 Search Engines and their market share for February 2007

Google 52.16%
Yahoo! Web Sites 10.43%
Google U.K. 10.20%
MSN 4.57%
Google Canada 3.39%
Google AdSense for Content 3.35%
AOL 1.59%
Google Germany 1.28%
Microsoft Live Search 0.99%
Yahoo! Web Sites U.K. 0.98%

Of course what we all really want to know is how this breaks down within the USA, Canada, UK, Germany etc. If I find this kind of details I'll post those numbers.

In the mean time, you can view the full details that are updated monthly at

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=1

Web Analytics & Daylight Savings Time

Much is being made about computers and switch this year to day light savings time happening two weeks earlier. Yes if you didn't download and install the appropriate patch, your personal computer will show the wrong time (off by an hour). So, what about your web analytics product?

As the clocks spring forward by an hour will you show an hour gap in your log reporting? The answer can be a bit complicated, but here goes the long and short of it.

If you're using a hosted web analytics tool like WebTrends OnDemand or Google Analytics, everything should be fine as I would expect these firms to have patched all their servers and planned for this change. If you're processing log files on your own server there are a couple of things to look out for.

First, is your web server or log data collection server patched and set to adjust automatically for the time change? If not, the entries in the log file will be off by an hour. Next, is your web analytics server and is it patched and ready for the time change. If either of these are not synchronized, then you'll have problems.

Just remember, the clocks are moving forward by one hour. So no matter what you do you'll see a gap as the clocks jump from 1:59:59 am to 3:00:00 am. The problem is if you don't see this event.

So plan and don't panic you still have a few days to prepare for it.