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Back to Basics - Web Log Analysis
Site statistics are the underlying visitor details of your site. They can tell you things like: where a visitor came from; what key phrases people are using to find your site on search engines; how many visitors have come to your site; what pages people looked at the most and what pages people looked at the least; and how many people signed up for the newsletter, registered, or bought product.
We run into a lot of companies that don't have the time or other resources to study and map trends based on these logs. Tracking marketing efforts, however, is the only way to know if they have been effective. So before embarking on any search engine or general web marketing, a company needs to learn how to at least glance at the logs and get a general sense of how things are progressing. And ideally, someone at the company or outsourced, should study the logs thoroughly and generate a useful summarization of the trends and tactics to improve traffic flow and sales.
Start by answering this question: What kind of software do you use to track your traffic?
If you answered with one of the following:
What tracking software?
I'm not sure.
My server sends me those reports.
This is the Back to Basics article for you. It's time to start justifying the money you spend to develop, maintain, and market your website.
Web Trends is the most popular web log analysis software. If you don't know what you have, you very well may have Web Trends. It is most popular simply by default. Most likely, your server has decided which web tracking software you will be using. And most choose Web Trends because they were one of the first programs out there. That's about the only reason.
While Web Trends gets the job done fundamentally, you might have an easier time using a more marketing-oriented program. We recommend two other programs: NetTracker and SiteStats.
NetTracker is more expensive but worth the money. All the reports in this program are cross integrated, so it's easy to see what phrase people searched on, how they progressed through the site, and it is generally an intuitive program that's easy to navigate through and understand. There are two ways to switch to NetTracker, either your server has to put this program on their system or you need ftp access to the logs. The cost of this program is $495. Learn more about it here:
http://www.sane.com
If you don't have access to your server logs, Site Stats is our second recommendation because it is similarly intuitive and
has the cross-referencing ability like NetTracker, and it's a bit cheaper and easy to install - placing code on your pages
and paying $30/month subscription. Learn more about it here: http://www.sitestats.com.
But whether you stick with Web Trends or try one of these more marketing-friendly programs, there is some basic terminology that, if you understand it, will make reading your logs an easier experience.
Reading the logs / Definitions:
* View or Hit: Depending on the software, may include hits to graphics files (such as JPGs and GIFs), scripts or any other type of file.
* Visit or Page View: A series of consecutive views of a Web site by the same user. These figures are considered estimates.
* Unique Visitor or Session: A person viewing a Web site. Without a cookie - a visitor is defined as a unique combination of a user agent and a host name or IP address. With cookies - a visitor would be defined by the cookie transmitted by the visitor's browser. This can also be an authenticated user name or a parsed parameter.
* Referring urls: Websites that send people to your website (search engines, directories, relating sites, etc.)
* Paths through site: Shows how people are going through site. Important in understanding content interaction.
How to analyze the logs:
1) Know your most wanted response. Do you want them to sign up for a newsletter, register, order a product? Choose one or two most wanted responses so that you have a goal as you look at the logs.
2) Look at the logs to see how many people are going to that page and performing your most wanted response. To make things easier, your software can be set up to generate a report specifically for that action.
3) Trends to look for -
a. Where is traffic coming from? Look under Referring urls or Referrer section.
b. What engines, what other sites, where do they enter the site? Referrer section.
c. How many people from each traffic source performed the most wanted response? Look in a section called "Traffic Analysis" or "Content/Path Through Site" to see how users traveled from the referring url through the site to the most wanted response page.
d. What's the ratio? Take the whole # of "unique visitors or sessions" and compare it to the # you noticed above that completed the most wanted response. How do you tell? They are typically directed to another page thanking them, for example, upon completing the most wanted response. If this info is not easy to see in the "Path through Site" section look for a "Path Summary" type of section that will summarize the # of people that ended up on your most wanted response page.
e. If the ratio is lower than you want, at what page do people start leaving the site? (Traffic Analysis or Content/Path
Through Site section) Maybe they drop out, for example, at the "Contact Us" page if you don't provide an address or phone number.
f. How long do they stay on each page? Look in your "Visitor Analysis Section" under something like "Visitor Duration." If it's 1 minute or less on the front page and then they leave, they were probably not looking for your service and you are targeting non-qualified traffic.
g. More specifically, how many people that came from your Overture campaign actually registered for your newsletter or bought product? (You can find this info under "Referring Urls" and Overture referrers can have extended tracking code like: "?source=overture" so you can recognize those referring urls)
h. How many people that came from your banner ad on your association website signed up for the contest? (You can also find this info under "Referring Urls")
i. Etc.
4) Once you start answering these questions, or other questions you need answered, you can tweak your site and your marketing to increase those ratios to what you need to be profitable.
Enabling Cookies
All the above-mentioned analysis will be made easier if you enable cookies on your server. Ask your hosting company to turn on the cookie capability for your site. This will allow you to track individual people, unique visitors/sessions more accurately. With the use of cookies you can watch one user over any period of days or months as they go and come from your site. You can know exactly what pages one user saw and if and when that particular user bought from your site or signed up to your newsletter. Basically, it lets you move from analyzing general trends to really focusing in on specific users. By combining cookies with server logs you would be able to track every single marketing strategy with almost flawless accuracy. You will know if your pay per click placements turned browsers into buyers or subscribers. By using different domain names, you can even easily track offline promotions for your site by sending people to particular pages or requesting they enter codes for discounts, etc.
Once you start getting involved with the web logs, you'll find it eye opening and incredibly worthwhile. In fact, we guarantee that once you start analyzing the logs, you'll wonder how you ever made a marketing decision for your website without really understanding it's effectiveness.
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