MSN has converted itself into Bing.com.  Now all web analytics packages are momentarily obsolete – until the next upgrade, code release, or until you take matters into your own hands and update the product you use.

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.

Lots of sites use Google Analytics and that is good news.  The next question becomes: ‘is it installed correctly’?  Here’s one tool which can help answer the question: SiteScan™ by EpikOne. It will check up to 1000 pages on your site and report the results via email. Pretty nice for a great price: free.

I finally found in one place the Google Analytics API documented in one place, all on one page. This page lists the myriad functions which can be called from the pageTracker object.

It’s true – the best way to understand and be sure what activity happens on your website is to open the logfiles. You’ll find a lot of activity which is good for your cause, such as search engine spiders and real human visitor activity, and you’ll find abuse such as hacker attacks and content theft. Blogger Eric Lander wrote this thorough post which introduces log file analysis to webmasters and SEOs.

This Wikipedia entry provides a most complete list of server log analysis tools, but remember, to get started looking at logs, all you really need is a good text editor. Even Notepad works in a pinch.