How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic (Part 2)

How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic
(Part 2 of a 3 Part Series)
Copyright 2002 by Herman Drost

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:
Hitbox (http://www.hitbox.com)
Sitemeter (http://www.sitemeter.com)
Extreme-DM (http://www.extreme-dm.com)

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.