[thelist] Basic Traffic tracking question

[Green, Janet]

>>>>BTW, the lookup on the IP address you gave returned this:
Official name: 1Cust166.tnt76.chi5.da.uu.net<<<


Just for clarification, I made up the number in my original post and as
someone pointed out, it should have been invalid because one of the numbers
was too high... at any rate, I would only be looking up the "top ten" IP's
each month, and as someone *else* pointed out, the location of the ISP's IP
doesn't necessarily accurately reflect the actual VISITOR's location. A
typical line in my server log looks like this: 

00:08:33  134.161.67.130 GET /changeyourview/images/play_anim.gif 200 

I assume this represents the sum-total of the info the server is actually
tracking, and there doesn't seem to be anything else in there suggesting
*where* a visitor is coming from. Our organization has a huge marketing
effort to bring ex-patrioted Iowans back to Greater Des Moines, so we
thought it would be helpful to know where the bulk of our visitors were
coming from so we could target those cities with "return to Des Moines"
marketing messages. Sounds like it is not really possible to track those
cities, with Webtrends or anything else, because the server does not collect
the data we need. 

This has been a very helpful discussion and I really thank everyone who
responded! 

Janet