Web Site Statistics - Log analyzers.

OVERVIEW

Once you have created your webpage, and have it out on the Internet working for you, you really need to know how well it is doing. Just putting a site out and hoping or thinking it's doing well is not very helpful.
To have an effective website you need to know how much traffic is coming to your site and which pages your visitors are looking at. Unless you can create reports on how effective your site is you will not know if it is attracting visitors or not. Knowing how many visitors your site is getting is absolutely essential if you intend to use any marketing campaigns. You really need to know if you traffic did increase after you paid money out to drive traffic to your site. Don't just take the work of the people you paid who claimed it worked. You need to be able to see if for yourself.

To do this you need a website statistics program, known as a log analyzer.

What’s a log?

All websites are hosted on servers somewhere. When a visitor clicks on a link that will take them to your site what really happens is that their browser sends a request you the server where your web page is located. This request asks the server to send it information. What it sends is the graphics files, text and url links that make up your page. All this information about what the visitors browser asked it to send is stored by the server in a file. This is called a log file.
You can't really look at the file itself and see any useful information, it's all a jumble of numbers and url codes. Sure you could learn to read the file if you wanted to but it would be time consuming and you would not get much out of it.
That’s where a log analyzer program comes in.

What is a log analyzer?

A log analyzer program takes the file which is listing all the stuff about your website and translates it into something you can read. It can tell you a whole bunch of things about what is happening on your website. How many visitors you are getting which days are most popular, which pages are being viewed the most. Some programs give only rudimentary information others can give enormous detail and what is going on at your site, it all depends on how much analysis of the log file they are doing.

How do I use a log analyzer?

That can be the difficult part. You must be able to access the log files for your website in order to use a log analyzer. If you can't do this you can't check your statistics.
You will most likely need to talk to whoever is hosting your web page and ask them about log files. You will need to know where they are located and obtain the url address string to this location so that either you or your statistics program can download the log file to your computer for analysis. Many companies will give you the location of this file and allow you to download it whenever you want.
If you web page is hosted by a big company they may not allow you access to the log files for your site. You will need to check their website and find out. If you can find the information there call them and ask. If they say NO ask them if they provide any statistic reporting services for your site. If they don't do that either you might want to consider finding another company that will provide you with either the log file access or a statistics report.

What kind of log file do you have? It is very important to know what kind of log file your website host server is creating. Most use what is called ‘standard format’ but a few use other kinds. All log analyzers need to know what kind of log file they are going to be looking at so that they can interpret it correctly.. Some analyzers only work on certain formats so it is essential that you know what kind you have before you start looking for a tool to use. Ask your web hosting company what kind of log file it is creating.

What kind of information do you want?

It is very important that you consider what kind of information you want to glean from your website statistics. Sit down and write out a list of the information you really need. Not what you think it would be cool to see. Some things are essential and some things are just ‘cool gizmos’ which you don't really need unless you are a huge site which is doing all kinds of marketing or customer interface work.

We recommend you need the following.

• How many hits you get to your website in a day/week. NOTE HITS IS NOT VISITORS. See What the Stats mean.
  
  
• Number of visitors per day/week
  
  
• Number of hits per visitor per visit.
  
  
• Most requested pages on your site (If you have a small site this will be all pages that get hits)
  
  
• Ability to run reports for specific date ranges. This way you can run weekly reports to see how things are progressing.
  
  
• Ability to exclude your own ip address so that your own visits to your website and not included in your reports.
  
  
• We consider it essential to be able to customize your reports to your own needs. Some programs do not allow this.

What you might need.

Where visitors are coming from. - This means which pages the visitor was on before they came to you. It does NOT mean where the visitor is located physically.

If you want to use this feature you will need a stats program that does lookup. What this means is that the program takes the url (or ip address) that the visitor came from and looks it up to find out what it's ‘real’ name is, then places this in the report. This ‘real’ name is found by looking up the number in something similar to a virtual telephone book for internet sites.

Drawbacks.
It takes a LONG time for any program to do this. If you want this feature expect that reports will take hours to run even for a small site.
Not all the information is useful. If the site has not listed a useful ‘real’ address name (rather like a false name or an unlisted telephone number) all you will get back is a number or a blank.

What log analyzers will offer?

You can get programs that offer as little as how many visitors you had right up to breakdowns to tracking each click that a specific visitor make on a pathway through your site. Programs in the simple end can be either free or very inexpensive, which those at the more detailed range will cost thousands of dollars (most expensive being about $45,000!)

What should I use?

We use a middle road program for your own reporting. In the process of finding it we tested almost everything that was available on the internet at that time (Mid 2000). The following reviews are our webmasters impressions of each program and how well they performed. Many reviews are not particularly long. If we found a product unhelpful or unimpressive we did not persist with testing it but moved on to the next.