Tips and Tricks

Unlock The Secrets of Server Logs

Short introduction to web analytics

By Catalin Bocanu, Web News Editor

19th of October 2007, 15:55 GMT

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Example of Traffic Data (hits, visits and more)

Web Analytics, according to Wikipedia represent "the study of the behaviour of website visitors". By analyzing the way your visitors interact with the site content, you will be able to achieve a better understanding of their needs or interests in a certain segment of the website content.

By efficiently employing web analytics methods, you will transform more of your common visitors into customers, increase your web site relative importance

in relation to other similar sites and more. For example, usually, a counter script will display the number of page hits (the number of total HTTP requests). But if you refresh the page several times, it will still count and, as a consequence, the data provided by simple hit counters is not enough to establish the number of visitors.

There are three widely-known methods employed in web analytics to gather data regarding visitors' actions and other particular traffic details: server log files analysis (parsing), Google Analytics and cookies usage. It is recommended to use information provided by all of them in order to have a better image by comparing different traffic data. The statistics laws are also present and applied in web analytics, due to the existence of various unpredictable phenomena, such as inexplicable increase of the number of hits from a certain geographical area.

Server log files analysis will provide you with a lot of information, visualized through graphs by web traffic analysis applications. This method is recommended as starting point for beginners for the understanding and interpretation of total number of hits, number of unique visitors, page views, number and type of one way links and more.

Correlating all analysis results with the nature of certain pages' content, you will discover the actual content value or your site's popularity. The correct manipulation of statistical data could help you modify various aspects that keep visitors away, such as heavy pages with a long loading time, low quality or insufficient content or the absence of accurate product descriptions in case of an ecommerce web site.

The secrets of web analytics, reflected mainly in server logs data, are hard to understand in a short time, due to the fact that traffic data can support different interpretations and combined analysis techniques accessible and understandable only after a long practice in this field.

TAGS:

TRAFFIC ANALYSIS | Search Engine Optimization | SEO | SITE OPTIMIZATION | WEB ANALYTICS

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