How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic

How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic

Copyright 2002 Herman Drost



Getting traffic to your web site without analyzing it, is like

being blindfolded in a crowd. You hear voices, but you don't

know which direction they are coming from or who they are.

Without analyzing your web site traffic, it's difficult to

improve your web site marketing.



Know Your Traffic Language

You should be aware of the different terms used to describe

web site traffic, so as not to be confused about your web site

visitors. Here are the main terms used:



Visit – these are all requests made by a specific user to the

site during a set period of time. The visit is ended if a set

period of time (say 30 minutes) goes by with no further

accesses. Users are identified by cookies, username or

hostnames/ip addresses



Hit – this is a request to the server for a file not a page.

Your page can be made up of different files, such as graphic

files, audio files or css and javascript files, resulting in a

number of hits for that page. Each of these requests is called a

hit.



Counting hits is not the same as tracking pageviews. It takes

multiple hits to view a page.



Pageview/Impression – this is the number of times a page is

accessed as a whole.



Unique View - A page view by a unique person within a 24 hour

period.



Referrer - A page that links to your site. By looking at your

referrers will tell you who's linked to your site. This can be

particularly valuable for seeing where your search engine



User Agent - This refers to the software used to access your

site. Sometimes known as a "browser" or "client", the term user

agent can describe a PHP script, a browser like Internet

Explorer, or a search engine spider like GoogleBot. If you can

identify what software is being used to access your site, you'll

be able to tell if users are abusing it, and when the search

engines last crawled your pages.



Ways to Track Your Visitors



1. Counters – these are heavily used on web sites by newbies but

appear unprofessional. It is very common to go to a page and see

something like "You are visitor number 12345 to this page".

These numbers cannot be trusted as the page designer has the

ability to seed the base number or to alter the counter such

that it adds more than 1 each time.



2. Trackers – tracking software details the path a visitor takes

through your Website, so they do more than just count your

traffic: they track it. Tracking software tells you more than

just the number of visitors -- it can break visitor statistics

down by date, time, browser, page viewed, referrer, and

countless other values.



Examples:



Sitemeter

Extreme-DM



Counters and Trackers often require you to place a button or

graphic on your site in exchange for the free use of their service,

which is not ideal for most site owners. So try to avoid using

these services unless you don't have the ability or expertise to

execute tracking scripts of any kind on your own server.



3. Using Your ISP's Statistical Package

Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) keeps log files which record

every single "hit" (request for a Web page or graphic) on your Web site.



Analyzing log data can give you a good idea of where your site

visitors are coming from, which pages they are visiting, how

long they stay, and which browsers they are using. Before

signing on with a hosting company, make sure they offer access

to raw log files. Even if you don't need them immediately,

sooner or later you'll be glad to have them.



There are also different types of log files - access, referrer,

error, and agent are the primary ones.



Here is a sample of a raw access log file entry:



Access log

Analyzing the access log will give you information

about who visited your site, which pages they visited, and how

long they stayed on the site. This is useful information in

determining whether or not your site is working as you intend.



The record below shows the visitor's IP number or hostname, date

and time of the request, the command received from the client,

the status code returned, the size of the document transferred,

and the browser and operating system the visitor was using.



nas-112-52.slc.navinet.net - - [29/Jan/2000:17:17:12 -0500] "GET

page.html HTTP/1.1" 200 23443

"http://www.mydomain.com/page.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;

MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)"



Referrer Log

The referrer log contains referral information - the source that

referred the visitor to your site. If the referrer was a search engine,

you will also find the keywords that were entered to find your

site - very useful information. Here are some example records. The record

below shows that the visitor followed a link from somedomain.com

to the index page of the site.



http://www.somedomain.com/page.html -> /



This record shows that the visitor came to my site from a search

engine link. Notice the keyword data is included in the record.



http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=design+tips -> /



Agent Log

This log provides information on which browser and operating

system was used to access your site.



Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)



Error Log

The error log obviously provides a record of errors generated

by the server and sent back to the client. The record below shows

the type of server, date and time of the error, client identification,

explanation of the error code generated by the server, and the path to the

file that caused the error.



apache: [Sun Jan 30 10:09:57 2000][error] [client 195.238.2.162]

File does not exist:/u/web/mydomain/favicon.ico



As you can see, log files contain a wealth of information about

how your visitors are using your site. Now we will talk about how

you get the relevant data extracted from the log files and compiled

into a useable format.



4. Web Traffic Analysis Software

These are programs that analyze your server logs and then create

traffic reports accordingly. The quality of the reports generated will

depend on what software you actually use. Some log analyzers are

free and come preinstalled on many hosting accounts, while others

can cost a good deal of money.



Examples:

Webalizer

WebTrends



Webalizer (free)

The Webalizer is a fast, FREE, web server log file analysis

program which produces usage statistics in HTML format

for viewing with a standard web browser. The results are

presented in both columnar and graphical format, which

facilitates interpretation. Yearly, monthly, daily and hourly

usage statistics are presented, along with the ability to

display usage by site, URL, referrer, user agent (browser),

search string, entry/exit page, username and country.



Here's an example of the Web Usage Statistics:

http://www.webalizer.com/sample/index.html



WebTrends ($495)

The Web Trends Analyzer produces essential reports on

web site visitor patterns, referring sites, visitor paths and

demographics. You can learn, for example, which sites

and keyword searches have referred the largest number of

visitors to your site.



It presents data, detailed and in-depth, in an organized and

concise tabular format with full-color graphs.



This Log Analyzer is priced at $495 and is licensed for a single

web server hosting content with a maximum of 50 domains.



Conclusion

Web traffic statistics provide very valuable information about your

web site. You can make better marketing decisions through them

telling you:

Which Web pages are most popular and which are least used.



Who is visiting your Web site.



Which Web browsers to optimize your Web pages for.



Which Web search engines are most useful to you, and which are the least useful.



Where errors or bad links may be occurring in your Web pages.



Web traffic analysis allows you to determine what marketing

strategies are successful, then to change them accordingly, to

boost your web traffic and sales.