Getting visitors to your site is not a simple task. There are various tasks involved: like making the site friendlier, adding keywords to make it more searchable and marketing the website with ads and promotions.
The first task a website owner should do is analysing the visits that the website gets each day. Each user visiting the website will be visiting it for some particular use. Such visits should be carefully analysed so that the visit will be prolonged making sure that the user gets something in return from the website. One should note where users are coming from and what they are doing.
“Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage.” *
There are mainly two different types of web analytics: off-site and on-site. Here we will describe on-site web analytics by analysing the server log files.
Web servers create log files and store all requests that they process (hits). This is done for the sole use to detect errors, know what visitors are accessing and can also be used for legal purposes. Such log files contain large potential which should be carefully analysed in order to extract as much information from them.
The advantages of log files analysis:
- No changes are required to the website.
- No 3rd party involved (data privacy and no loss of analytics due to downtime)
- All transactions are logged (no blocking from client side i.e. nothing is lost)
Analysing the data
- Know your visitors country
This can be necessary to know the trends and culture of the visitors, like the spoken language. - Know the referrers
Know who mentions/links to your website. - Know the search keywords
See what users are searching to get to your website. - Know the browsers used
Make sure that the website works with these browsers. - Detect any errors particularly the 404 (page not found)
Errors make a website less professional which is something that you do not want. - Detect your most common pages
Such pages would be the entry points to your websites, the ones that give the first impression to the visitor.
What to do
- Visit your referrers and check what they are saying about you.
- Test your website with the browsers being used.
- Fix any errors
- Add keywords to the website content which are not being used in the search terms.
- Optimize the entry pages by adding/removing links and organizing them.
USING APACHE LOGS VIEWER FOR WEB ANALYTICS
With Apache Logs Viewer you can do web analytics easily without the need of relying on 3rd party analytics services. Such services are never 100% accurate and can never be reliable, although they can be quite helpful and easy to use. To use Apache Logs Viewer all that is required is that you enable raw access logs on your web server. Most web hosting packages have such a feature as part of any package. You can find it in the popular cpanel under the Advanced Statistics section.
There are various ways how you can use Apache Logs Viewer for web analytics. For starters you can generate a geographical map of the world with different shades which reflects the number of visits from that country. The brighter the color the more visitors visited the website. You can also determine important information such as search terms used and how many requests originated from searches.
Advantages of Apache Logs Viewer
- All Visits are shown (no loss)
- Requests to non html documents are recorded (PDF, DOC, XLS etc)
- Protect your visitors by not divulging visits to 3rd parties
Download Apache Logs Viewer for free and check it out
