Analyzing your website activity
Analyzing your web site is an important part in creating a web site that keeps visitors coming back for more. It is like the fuel, oil, water and speedometer in a car. You need it to keep your site running smoothly, improve performance and inform you if something is wrong. Analyzing your web site can tell you:
- who visited your site
- how many visitors came to your site
- how they found your site - the search engine they used and the keywords they searched for
- which files/directories they accessed
- when they came to your site
- which browsers, download managers and operating system they are used
- which errors occur on your site
- whether your web promotion is paying off
Armed with this information, you can now measure different ways of promoting your web site, updating your site when it is quiet, removing errors on your site, adding content to pages which your visitors find most interesting, and more.
Methods to measure web site activity
(Technically speaking, a guest book is also a way to track web site activity but it will not be discussed here.) The other methods to track web site activity are:
- Counters,
- Trackers and
- Log Files.
Hit counters
Every time a visitor access the web page, a counter is increased. You need a unique counter on every page you want to track. This number can be displayed on the page, it can be e-mailed to you or you can access it online. Counters only give a ball park indication of traffic as hits can be generated by yourself, search spiders coming to catalogue your site and online web checking tools as described above. It is not of much use for someone who wants to improve their website activity as you do not know where the hits came from. Examples are at http://www.beseen.com, http://www.thecounter.com, http://www.fastcounter.com,Trackers
Every time a visitor comes to your web site, the visitor's detail is recorded in a log file on the tracker's host server. This also involves inserting some code in your html code linking to a remote host supplying the Web Activity Monitor. You need tracker code on every page you want to track. The activity reports can then be e-mailed to you or you can access it online. Examples are WebSiteGarage's Hitometer at http://www.websitegarage.com , Extreme Tracking at http://www.extreme-dm.com/tracking/, Hitmeter at http://www.hitmeterservice.com and Superstats at http://www.superstats.com . Tracking provides more information on web activity than counters, e.g. where your visitors came from, which keywords the used to search for your site, what browser they use, when they visited, etc. This method of web activity monitoring is the best way if your web host does not supply log files. However, it is still not good enough, e.g. you cannot see which errors occurred on your web site, which files were most accessed, who visited your site, etc.Log Files
Every time a visitor comes to your web site, the visitor's detail is entered in a log file on your web host's server (if logging is enabled on the server). This information includes the IP Address of a visitor, the data and time a file/page was accessed, the size of the file/page accessed, a code indicating if the file/page access was successful as well as referrer information (if enabled on the server). The referrer information includes information about a visitor's browser, operating system, the search engine and keywords used to find your website, etc.. Some web hosts supply referrer information in the log files, but some do not because this information more than doubles the size of the log files. You need referrer information in log files if you want to properly analyze your web site activity. There are many variations how web hosts delivers the log files to their clients:
- Some web hosts only makes the log files accessible to clients by placing it in an accessible directory. You have to download the files and analyze it yourself by using a log file analyzer. There are many log file analyzers available from http://www.tucows.com under Log Analyzers but read the page what to look for in a log file analyzer before buying.
- Some web hosts generate web activity reports from these log files on a scheduled basis or on requests from clients. The web activity reports are then e-mailed to the client or supplied online. In the second instance, you have to access the reports with a browser.
Recommendation
The best way to analyze web site activity is by using a dedicated log file analyzer on log files. If you are serious about your web site and your host does not supply log files with referrer information, find a host that does.See our page what to look for in a web host and the page what to look for in a log file analyzer for more information.