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Log File Analysis?
posted on 2006-03-10 11:23:56What is absolutely vital to know if you own a web site, is how many people have seen it. The site attendance can be measured by calculating your log files. There is specific data about your website that can be extracted from your log files and you should be checking it on a regular basis.
Log file analysis is also called site statistics. It is measured to provide you with information about a lot of variables that determine your site attendance. For example, a log file analysis can tell you how many people have visited your page this month, where they live, at what point they switched on to another website, do they often visit your site and much more valuable information. Statistics also help you measure the success of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign. To know which search engine to use and how to improve the existing one, you should compare the data from your traffic statistics. SEO firms can do this for you: they can analyze your stats and tell you where your search engine traffic is coming from and what keywords people use to reach your web site. Log file analyses can give you information about your site’s popularity and usability. You can be informed about the type of visitors your web pages attract and about errors on your HTML code, if such exist.
For optimal usage of the statistic data, you should install a proper program for website stats. AWStats (www.awstats.org) is of finest quality and can do priceless work. Most of all, it is free to download. The installation is not as difficult as it may seem, especially if you have Alexandar available to help you. He installed and set up this program for members of our group. You can ask him to arrange the program for you, at an affordable fee.
So, if you already have AWStats installed, maybe I should give you some advice about which information is useful for you. There are many important factors and variables you need to investigate on a monthly or even weekly basis so that you supervise the proper condition of your site design and achieve page optimization. Basically, these variables can be divided into two large groups- variables determining your web pages, and factors influencing the visitors to your site. The important thing to keep in mind is that you CAN CHANGE all these variables and increase the popularity of your website. Look carefully through the following list:
1) Pages. First of all, you need to get the precise data about your web pages and their popularity amongst visitors. The following variables determine web pages and their usability.
- Entry paths. Entry pages can be defined as the pages from which your website visitors enter your site. They are normally shown first in the search engine, and then followed up by the visitor. They can also be followed from outside links. Entry pages can provide you with reasonable information about which pages attract people’s attention, and how you can improve the other pages to attract even more visitors. Website’s entry pages can give you insights about the success of a marketing campaign or how good your marketing messages are in making people visit your website.
- Most Requested Pages and Top Entry Pages. They are the most visited pages on your site. They can tell you which features of your site attract the most visitors. The most requested pages can show you which elements in them are popular amongst visitors, so that you can modify the other pages and increase your site popularity. This information is also precious when dealing with scripts. If, for example, you have a newsletter signup script called newsletter.php and your top entry pages statistics tell you the newsletter is the top requested page, you may conclude that visitors are interested in signing up for your newsletter.
- Top exit pages. These pages show you at exactly which point the visitor leaves your website. These statistics give very practical information about what may be repelling the customers from your website. The plainest example: if you determine that the greatest number of visitors leaving your website is when they reach the shopping cart checkout page, you may conclude that there is something wrong with it. So, you should take the steps to fix it: it may be because the script is malfunctioning, or the process of checking out is too time-consuming and sophisticated. In any case, these statistics make you aware that there is something WRONG with a certain page.
- Direct Pages. They show you that a visitor got to your website by directly typing the web address on the address bar of the browser.
- Landing Pages for PCC/ Affiliate Campaigns. Special landing pages or tracking ids can be used if you participate in a Pay-Per-Click campaign or in an Affiliate scheme. Your site logs give you information about traffic and conversion: how many people visited the site and what they did after that, if they bought anything or not.
- Average number of HTML pages per visit. If you have the concrete number about how many pages the average visitor sees before leaving your website, you will know whether your site is attractive. If people leave having seen only one or two pages, then it is high time you radically improved the site. Drastic changes in content and layout of interesting images, also adding various lists of links may increase the attractiveness of your site.
2) Visitors. Another important thing you need to learn from using log file analysis is information about visitors , their interest in your site, how they found it, what type of browsers they use to get to websites, and so on. There are several variables that deal with this.
- Search Phrases. These are phrases used by the visitor to find your website. Most people don’t search with single words, but with phrases. These phrases are typed in a search engine as keywords. If people who typed these keywords found your website relevant to the things they searched for, the search phrases you have used are appropriate. But often you get a large amount of traffic from irrelevant keywords typed by different visitors. So, you need to have information about which keywords bring visitors to your site, and if they are irrelevant to the content, you should change the site keywords. People can also use different variations of the exact phrase that leads to your website. You should also note the number of views each specific page is receiving, not only the exact phrases that are being used to get there.
- Types of browsers used. This information can give you an idea of whether or not that Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape is more popular for your audience. The browser’s qualities are very important for reaching certain sites, so you need to make charts and keep an eye on the type of browser your visitors use. If you notice that most of the people use a certain kind of browser, you might use that particular browser to check your pages before publishing them. You may use this information to decide which advanced HTML and plug-in features to have on your site. If a larger number of your visitors use older browsers, you may have to reduce the advanced features that you would like to include. Several days ago I noticed somebody, who had entered my site using the first Netscape beta browser!
- Visit Duration. This may be another important characteristic of the visitor’s interest in your website. The time that people spend on a certain site is a strong indicator of how good the site is. If a great number of people exit almost immediately after entering, then you need to make substantial improvements to your site. It may also require adjustments in the key search phrases that you are using. If you are selling some goods online and people tend to stay too long on your site without buying anything, this may indicate a failure in you marketing strategy and messages: you need to make them more attractive to the audience.
- Referrer - another thing to have in mind when trying to make the profile of your visitors is their Internet origin: from which site they came from. This is called a referrer. A referrer is the last site visited or a single page on that site. There are two types of referrers: Referring Domains and Referring URLs. A referring URL is the link on the website viewed by the visitors, which led them to your site. It is important to know where the visitor found your website and decided to follow up the link. It allows you to calculate your inbound links. You can also have valuable information about where your traffic came from, from which search engines and directories.
- Hits. When a site visitor clicks to get to a certain page of your site, each HTML page is counted as a hit. Note a hit is also treated every time a graphic is clicked on a page. For example, a page with five graphics would generate six hits –five for the graphics and one for the page itself. So, you should be careful and not let this mislead you if you are trying to count how many people visited your site.
| Chetan Menge posted on 2008-08-09 08:01:24 |
| HI to all developers. I want to know how to get the log file form the web server. I am having the ftp account. But how to locate the path of log file.(not manually but through code) so that i can use it for analysis purpose. |
| Veselin posted on 2008-08-26 22:32:35 |
| Hi Chetan Menge, you will need to contact your hosting company and ask them about the log files. They usually put log files in a special folder on your server where you have access or you can download them using the hosting account control panel. It all depends on your hosting company configuration. |