How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic

Introduction

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 traffic is coming from.

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.

In Part 2 of this article series we'll look at some of the ways to track your web site visitors.

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In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the the different terms used to describe web site traffic language.

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

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)"

Referer 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.

In Part 3 of this article series, we'll discuss Web Traffic Analysis Software.

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In Part 2 of this series, we discussed some of the ways to track your web site visitors. Now we will take a look at:

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 (http://www.webalizer.com) WebTrends (http://www.webtrends.com)

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.

Here's a sample of the web usage statistics: http://download.netiq.com/Library/SampleReports/ WAS_LA_Complete/complete.HTM

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.

By analyzing your web traffic, you can determine what marketing strategies are successful. You can then change them as necessary, to boost the sales or services from your site.

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