How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic (Part 2)Learn Web Hosting Help and Information on mps-web-hosting.com. How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic (Part 2) article will help answer your questions on Web Hosting Help and Information.We at mps-web-hosting.com specialize in Web Hosting Help and Information. Web Hosting Help and Information at mps-web-hosting.com provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
(Part 2 of a 3 Part Series) Copyright 2002 by Herman Drost In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the the different terms used to describe web site traffic language. Ways to Track Your Visitors 1. Counters – these are heavily used on web sites by newbies but appear unprofessional. It is very common to go to a page and see something like 'You are visitor number 12345 to this page'. These numbers cannot be trusted as the page designer has the ability to seed the base number or to alter the counter such that it adds more than 1 each time. 2. Trackers – tracking software details the path a visitor takes through your Website, so they do more than just count your traffic: they track it. Tracking software tells you more than just the number of visitors -- it can break visitor statistics down by date, time, browser, page viewed, referrer, and countless other values. Examples: Hitbox (http://www.hitbox.com) Sitemeter (http://www.sitemeter.com) Extreme-DM (http://www.extreme-dm.com) Counters and Trackers often require you to place a button or graphic on your site in exchange for the free use of their service, which is not ideal for most site owners. So try to avoid using these services unless you don't have the ability or expertise to execute tracking scripts of any kind on your own server. 3. Using Your ISP’s Statistical Package Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) keeps log files which record every single 'hit' (request for a Web page or graphic) on your Web site. Analyzing log data can give you a good idea of where your site visitors are coming from, which pages they are visiting, how long they stay, and which browsers they are using. Before signing on with a hosting company, make sure they offer access to raw log files. Even if you don't need them immediately, sooner or later you'll be glad to have them. There are also different types of log files - access, referrer, error, and agent are the primary ones. Here is a sample of a raw access log file entry: Access log Analyzing the access log will give you information about who visited your site, which pages they visited, and how long they stayed on the site. This is useful information in determining whether or not your site is working as you intend. The record below shows the visitor's IP number or hostname, date and time of the request, the command received from the client, the status code returned, the size of the document transferred, and the browser and operating system the visitor was using. nas-112-52.slc.navinet.net - - [29/Jan/2000:17:17:12 -0500] 'GET page.html HTTP/1.1' 200 23443 'http://www.mydomain.com/page.html' 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)' Referer Log The referrer log contains referral information - the source that referred the visitor to your site. If the referrer was a search engine, you will also find the keywords that were entered to find your site - very useful information. Here are some example records. The record below shows that the visitor followed a link from somedomain.com to the index page of the site. http://www.somedomain.com/page.html -> / This record shows that the visitor came to my site from a search engine link. Notice the keyword data is included in the record. http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=design+tips -> / Agent Log This log provides information on which browser and operating system was used to access your site. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.01; Windows 98) Error Log The error log obviously provides a record of errors generated by the server and sent back to the client. The record below shows the type of server, date and time of the error, client identification, explanation of the error code generated by the server, and the path to the file that caused the error. apache: [Sun Jan 30 10:09:57 2000][error] [client 195.238.2.162] File does not exist:/u/web/mydomain/favicon.ico As you can see, log files contain a wealth of information about how your visitors are using your site. Now we will talk about how you get the relevant data extracted from the log files and compiled into a useable format. In Part 3 of this article series, we'll discuss Web Traffic Analysis Software.
Here's your daily hosting industry news briefing for Thursday, July 13, 2006 Article Index: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |
More Articles:1. Webfarms: The Only Way To Host! Networks can be configured to be so incredibly redundant now - for reasonable prices - that there is no excuse for a data center not to achieve five nines (99.999%) of availability.But what about the servers and applications? Why spend so much time up front configuring the network to make sure it doesn't fail, and then deploy an application to a single server?Sure, there are ways to make sure individual servers have some redundancy to minimize failures -- things like RAID1, RAID5, or RAID10 (red… 2. Update MailScanner If you run mailscanner please make sure it is up to date. Here is a tip from the creator of the software package. Some of the virus scanner 'wrapper' and 'autoupdate' scripts have been updated in version 4.24. If upgrading from earlier versions using the RPM distributions, you will need to manually rename each of the /usr/lib/MailScanner/*.rpmnew files over the top of the old scripts in the same directory. To do them all at once, you can do this: sh cd /usr/lib/MailScanner for NEW in *-wrapper.… 3. The importance of monitoring your website The importance of monitoring your website Are you monitoring your website? You should be, especially if you are using it to make some extra cash, and definitely if it is your only source of income. You need to monitor your website to protect it from so many nasties which could affect your bottom line. Any of the following could bring your site to a close. A hack attack. If your website is hacked, it could be used for any number of illegal activities. A hacker could use your hosting account to… 4. Information About Choosing a Web Hosting Company By Purva Mewar You choose web hosting company only once. The most important thing that you have to remember about a web hosting company is that you get to choose your web hosting company only once. No second chance. No replacing or changing of web hosting company is possible once its been finalized. Therefore it is very crucial that you are convinced about all the factors of your web hosting company being up to the mark. Like everything else, deciding about a webhosting company or choosing a web hosting com… |
||||
