by [TC]²
August 2005
Imagine if you will…Willy Webmaster, meticulously slaving away at his work; tweaking the pages of his web site for maximum efficiency. He carefully constructs keyword placement, inserts relevant text links for search engine friendliness, and registers his site with various online search engines. Keeping his fingers crossed and hoping the masses find his web site, he brushes his hands together, walking away from the good work he has done.
Oh no; Willy Webmaster has just walked out of his project and directly into, the Twilight Zone.
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Be a Traffic Monitor!
By Walt McKinney, [TC]²
Would you host a party at your home, but hide yourself away in a closet for the duration? In the closet, you would be oblivious regarding who showed up, or what took place while the guests were there. Which door did Sally use to enter the home; front or side? How long did Dan spend in the kitchen? After he left the kitchen, where did he go from there; living room or den? Pinpointing every move of your party guests is probably not important to you, but if you maintain a web site, the devil is in the details.
Amazingly, many web workers bury their heads in the sand regarding web traffic analysis. They are like the blissfully ignorant party host hiding in a closet. It's impossible to know whether 10 or 10,000 people have visited your site without using some sort of measuring tool. How many visitors came? How long did they stay? Which pages were the most popular? Where did the visitors come from? These are all valid questions that can be answered by gathering log file statistics.
Web hosting providers usually provide some sort of basic online reporting, but there are more in-depth measuring tools available.
Web servers generate log files on a regular basis. These log files can either be ‘read' by the online reporting tool provided by the site host, or can be downloaded and analyzed by some specialized free-standing application. Once downloaded, the log files can actually be viewed as text (opened in notepad for example). Comprehending the output from the log files in this fashion however, is virtually impossible. That's where the specialized application comes in handy.
Web analysis software reads the raw log files, digesting and segmenting the information. In short order, it prepares a report that is easy to read and understand. As Webmaster for www.techexchange.com and www.tc2.com , (as well as other company sites) it is my duty to provide monthly reports detailing traffic to these sites.
Currently, I use an application called WebTrends to carry out this task. Log files are downloaded on a regular basis and run through the WebTrends application. Specific reports are then created, detailing activity such as:
* How many visitors came to the techexchange web site last month?
* How many views have been registered for the latest article published in our library ?
* What countries are our visitors coming from?
* Which pages are the most popular?
* Which day of the week generally registers the most traffic?
The questions can go on and on, and WebTrends is a fine tool for discovering the answers. Profile properties can be defined and tweaked within the application so that you can obtain the specific blocks of information you need. Exclusions can be established for example, so that spiders crawling the site will not register as a visit.
As with any tool, proper usage can make all the difference. One challenge that I faced early on in using the software was this: Our web host, like many others, lumps all of our account activity together in a common file. For example, five different web sites residing under the same account are statistically co-mingled within single log files. Running an analysis on these files returns data for the entire account, so that all traffic data for all five sites shows up in a single report. This way, searching for specific site or page data is more difficult and cumbersome. I soon learned however, with WebTrends, hit filters can be created so that running a report will only analyze log entries matching the criteria defined in that specific hit filter. This way, running a report detailing www.techexchange.com activity, excluding all other sites detailed in the log file, can be accomplished.
Some people make the assumption that site traffic is best summed up by the number of hits recorded. This is not true. The WebTrends glossary defines a hit like so:
Hit: Each file requested by a visitor registers as a hit. There can be several hits on each page. While the volume of hits reflects the amount of server traffic, it is not an accurate reflection of the number of pages viewed.
A single web page, consisting of four images, may actually register five hits for a single page view. A more appropriate measuring stick for traffic might be visits, as defined by WebTrends:
Visit: A visit is a series of actions that begins when a visitor views their first page from the server, and ends when a visitor leaves the site or remains idle beyond the idle-time limit. The default idle-time limit is thirty minutes. This time limit can be changed by the system administrator.
If you were simply interested in unique visits, you may want to pay special attention to the unique visitors detail in your reports.
Unique Visitors: Individuals who visited your site during the report period. If someone visits more than once, they are counted only the first time they visit.
There are many other interesting aspects of reporting that you may wish to explore such as referring pages, browser types, country or city of origin, domains, entry pages, exit pages, visit duration, etc.
Of course, the generation of inbound site traffic begins with marketing, and properly crafted web pages, allowing search engines to find and index your site.
There is much to be learned regarding your inbound web site traffic. Don't throw a party only to hide in the closet, or be like Willy Webmaster, stumbling aimlessly through the Twilight Zone!
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WebTrends is our tool of choice, but here are a few links to some other options: