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How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic (Part 2)

How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic (Part 2 of a 3 Part ...
2002 by Herman DrostIn Part 1 of this series, we ... the the ...
terms usedto describe web site traffic ... How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic (Part 2 of a 3 Part Series)Copyright 2002 by Herman DrostIn Part 1 of this series, we discussed the the different terms usedto describe web site traffic language.
Ways to Track Your Visitors 1. Counters these are heavily used on web sites by newbies butappear unprofessional.
It is very common to go to a page and seesomething like "You are visitor number 12345 to this page".These numbers cannot be trusted as the page designer has theability to seed the base number or to alter the counter suchthat it adds more than 1 each time. 2.
Trackers tracking software details the path a visitor takesthrough your Website, so they do more than just count yourtraffic: they track it. Tracking software tells you more thanjust the number of visitors -- it can break visitor statisticsdown by date, time, browser, page viewed, referrer, andcountless 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 orgraphic on your site in exchange for the free use of their service,which is not ideal for most site owners.
So try to avoid usingthese services unless you don't have the ability or expertise to execute tracking scripts of any kind on your own server. 3.
Using Your ISPs 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 sitevisitors are coming from, which pages they are visiting, howlong they stay, and which browsers they are using.
Beforesigning on with a hosting company, make sure they offer accessto 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 logAnalyzing the access log will give you informationabout who visited your site, which pages they visited, and howlong they stayed on the site.
This is useful information indetermining whether or not your site is working as you intend.The record below shows the visitor's IP number or hostname, dateand 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] "GETpage.html HTTP/1.1" 200 23443"http://www.mydomain.com/page.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)" Referer LogThe referrer log contains referral information - the source thatreferred the visitor to your site.
If the referrer was a search engine, you will also find the keywords that were entered to find yoursite - very useful information. Here are some example records.
The recordbelow shows that the visitor followed a link from somedomain.comto the index page of the site.http://www.somedomain.com/page.html -> /This record shows that the visitor came to my site from a searchengine 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 operatingsystem 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 showsthe type of server, date and time of the error, client identification, explanation of the error code generated by the server, and the path to thefile 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 abouthow your visitors are using your site.
Now we will talk about howyou get the relevant data extracted from the log files and compiledinto a useable format.In Part 3 of this article series, we'll discuss Web Traffic Analysis Software. Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com .