By John Flanagan
CEO, Green Island Interactive
Too many businesses have a web site, but have no idea of how many people are visiting it. Visitor analysis provides real-time information on how many people are visiting a site, what pages they are visiting, where they are coming from, and much more. But it is not an exact science, and knowing its limitations is important.
How Does It Work?
Most every web server keeps a log of what it's doing— and being a computer, it's usually in great detail. These logs are simply plain text files, and would not be very readable to humans. Luckily there are programs available that will trawl through these logs and present the information in a friendly format, including charts and graphs so that you don't need to be a techie to know what's going on with your site.
What Do We Use?
At Green Island we use the The Webalizer log file analysis program. To quote their web site: The Webalizer is a fast, free web server log file analysis program. It produces highly detailed, easily configurable usage reports in HTML format, for viewing with a standard web browser. The Webalizer is a very powerful system, and we offer it as a standard service with all of our hosting accounts. If you're not sure how to access your log files, contact us and we'll be glad to give you all the details.
What Information is Available?
All the information that is stored in your log file can be presented in a number of ways, and The Webalizer gives many choices:
- Break down by year, month, day, hour
- Total hits, files, pages, visits
- Referring sites such as Google or a partner site
- Entry and exit pages
- What countries people are coming from
- Error information, pages not found
- Much more
How To Read Your Analysis
For those not familiar with the terminology, reading through your analysis can be a little daunting. Luckily there is some great information available on The Webalizer's web site, in particular the Simpleton's Guide to Web Server Analysis and the Webalizer Quick Help which includes a very useful glossary. And of course we're always available if you have any questions!
How To Use Your Analysis Effectively
So now that you know what server analysis is, where to find it, and how to read it, how will you use it to help turn your web site into an effective tool? There are limitations to server analysis (as we will discuss in a moment) and I recommend keeping things simple at first. On the first page of your analysis will be a "Summary by Month", and the "daily average visits" from month to month is a great way to see if your results are improving. Other way to verify results include:
- Determine what pages on the site are the most popular
- Figure out if a new page is working
- Determine which search engines are sending the most traffic
- Entry and exit pages
- Assess the effectiveness of a new marketing campaign
Limitations
For reasons dealing with the HTTP protocol and other technical factors, there are many limitations to what we can learn from analyzing our server logs. For those of a technical leaning, there are more technical details available on the Simpleton's Guide to Web Server Analysis. But the gist of it is that server analysis is not an exact science, and in most cases is best suited for determining trends. For example, it may be more effective to look at whether the number of hits to your site is shrinking or growing over time, as opposed to how many hits you get per month.
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