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QUESTION: I see a lot of reference to page logs in the posts but I've never seen one. I, and possibly others reading this would like to know more about what exactly is in these mystical logs that are so helpful... >>> Moderator's response >>>Tim, that's a good question and I'll try to address it as directly as possible. First of all, there is nothing really "mystical" about server logs. The first thing you have to understand is that a Web page is made up of an html file and perhaps several graphic files that are all housed on a central computer that has a live connection to the Internet 24 hours a day. By typing in a url http://www.exposure-usa.com/ it calls up a specific file on the remote computer and makes it visible on your browser. Because everything involves an information transfer, it can easily be measured: The main page of your site, index.html may have been requested 500 times in 24 hours. That's easy to measure. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you had 500 visitors. Most stats programs reside on the server and automatically generate a daily or weekly report that can also tell you a number of different things about your site that are extremely useful in promoting the site and learning about visitor habits. I'm going to refer to a sample page of stats that is on WebTrend's site. If there are any other stats companies on this list, no, I do not work for WebTrends - they just happened to be the first one that came to mind, and they gave me stock in the company (just kidding folks). Marketwave's Hit List Pro http://www.marketwave.com/ is also a good stats program. WebTrends sample log: http://www.webtrends.com/products/log/reports/report.htm From this (and most any other site log), you can tell an incredible amount of useful data including: It is critical that you measure unique visitors if you are trying to figure out how many visitors you have before you make one sale on your site, and use this information to determine how effective advertising buys were on targeted sites. In most cases it is best to buy on a site that targets your customer demographics with laser-like precision and have one out of every five visitors generate a sale on your site, then it would be to conduct a really broad buy and have only one in every one hundred visitors generate a sale. While general bulk buys may not be as good at conversion, they are excellent for a branding type of campaign. Why would this be important? Well, there was a client of mine that needed to find out why sales were down on their site. Once they started monitoring the site stats in detail, they found that nearly fifty percent of all visitors that loaded the main page of their site backed out of it within 30 seconds. You can't tell this unless you are measuring stats. Like many businesses, they had designed their site to "look cool" instead of designing it from an effective marketing or usability standpoint. They had cool graphics alright, that were taking well over a minute for 14.4 and 28.8 bs modems to load fully. Not everyone is on a 56K modem or a T-1. If you design a site that can only be effectively loaded on a high speed modem or viewed with nine of the latest plug-ins, then you are effectively slamming the door on a large percentage of potential customers. They compressed some graphics, removed others and gee -- their traffic to the rest of the site suddenly increased by fifty percent... But the point is, you're flying blindfolded if you don't measure. This is crucial to helping you figure out what is interesting to your visitors. If there are twice as many visitors to the laptop section of your site as other parts of your site, put up more content on laptops or it could be an indication that you may want to expand your line of laptops for sale. Maybe they need the content changed or need to be removed and replaced with more popular content. Or maybe you need to seriously consider that the structure of your site may be such that you are making it very difficult for visitors to find these pages. Perhaps you have some bad links to them? An "Entry Page" is like a door to your site. The main url may be the front door, but it doesn't mean that that is the only way people come into your site. When a search engine indexes your site it may index several pages. When someone else links to Pampers http://www.pampers.com/ they may not link to the main page but to the content section on changing a diaper. It would be important for Pampers to know that 25% of their traffic comes to their site through that section, so that they know if they took it down they'd immediately lose 25% of their traffic. Which page are they one when they leave your site? Why do they leave your site on that page? What can you do to keep them on your site? Maybe you should remove those fifty reciprocal links that 80% of your site is leaving through or add an html tag that launches a new browser window. Or maybe you should simply give them a reason for staying on your site instead of offering them twenty different exit doors to leave it. Referer logs can easily tell you both the url of the site that is linked to you and how many unique visitors come to your site from that url. You can also determine from these logs which search engine listing is bringing your site the most visitors, and even better -- which specific keywords people are typing in when they find your site ! This type of information is invaluable when you go to list in other engines. If "Rock Climbing" is how everyone is finding you, then that had damn well better be the first set of keywords in your meta tags when you list with the other search engines. But you won't know unless you are reading your logs, will you? Wouldn't it be cool if you could actually tell the most popular routes that people take when they navigate your site and then position your product or service accordingly? Well you can... But not if you aren't reading your logs... Wouldn't it be nice to know that you were getting 65% of your visitors from those people with an AOL.COM domain? Wouldn't it be wise to therefore make sure you check your site to see that through an aol browser it looks fine? Which countries are visiting your site? Right now the highest percentage is usually United States domains, but that's only because they have the highest percentage of users on the Net. As the Net takes other countries and continents by storm, wouldn't it be nice to realize that 20% of your visitors were from China and to offer them a version of your site in their own language? Can't tell if they're from China if you don't read your logs... If you own your own server or have to make changes to your Web site, wouldn't it make sense to take it offline or make changes only during the hour of the day when there are the fewest visitors? Server logs can show you visitor habits. If it's 25% of the time, that's a heck of a lot of traffic that you may be losing out on. One of these days someone on this list is going to tell me about or invent a program that can actually tell me the urls that are bringing up these errors so that I can put up pages for them. I don't know of a program, but it would be wonderful to know that I had a listing on Yahoo that brought up an error so that I could immediately put up a page to that url. Are the majority of your visitors from .edu domains or .com or .mil? This is not without its faults, however, because these stats are based on the location of the ISP and not the user. Everyone on America Online is automatically located in Vienna, VA, which kind of skewes the results... It would be really good to know if 80% are still using Netscape 3.0 so that you could make sure that your site appeared correctly on that browser and did not include any "technological advances" that made that browser crash. MS Win 95, 3.0, NT, Mac ? Again, all useful information. Site stats and server logs are only as intimidating as you let them be. Anyone who is involved with commerce or advertising on the Web who does NOT pay attention to these logs and use them to strategize, is really passing up a wonderful opportunity to increase business and traffic to their site. One book that I highly recommend that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about stats is called: "Web Site Stats" by Rick Stout. Available at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/ . Hope this explanation has shed some light on those of you that aren't paying attention to your server logs or are only measuring how many "hits" your site is getting. Remember: Many ISP's may indeed measure the number of "hits" because they bill by server useage, and by definition, a "hit" occurs when a file is accessed. But it has no relevance to the online advertising industry, nor is it useful to a site owner in determining actual visitors or page views. It is merely a measure of how many kb or mb of files were accessed during a given period. If they are not providing you with the stats you need, ASK for them. AB Adam Boettiger - President Click On The Banner To Visit Our Website
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