Analyzing Your Web Traffic Log
A Web Hosting Article Contributed by Frances Rhea
Understanding Your Web Traffic Logs
There is a wealth of information contained in your server's Web traffic logs. The key is understanding the information presented about your Web traffic. Understanding your Web traffic logs can help you know a lot more about your visitors habits.
What a Web Traffic Log Can Tell You
You want to know how many people are visiting your site; what countries they are from; which pages they viewed; how often they return; and how they found your Web site in the first place.
Your Web server traffic log has the answers to most of these questions depending on which site statistics program your server has installed. Almost all servers provide an error log which will tell you which files cannot be found that are linked to your Web pages. Many Web servers will provide one or more programs for your use to determine just how your Web site traffic is doing.
Most Popular Web Traffic Log Program
Webalizer is the most popular program for a server to have installed to determine Web site traffic. This program provides you with graphs of your daily, monthly, and yearly statistics. Clicking on any month accesses a separate window which tells you additional detailed information about your Web site. The problem is, what do all of these statistics mean.
Statistics You Can Understand
Every time a visitor requests a page from your site your Web server logs information about that request. It can tell you which pages are the most popular and even what other sites have been using your graphics on their pages.
The Visit Entry Point report displays how many visitors have entered your Web site on each individual page. It also shows information about how many visitors last viewed a particular page before leaving your site. By clicking on the individual links, you can also determine the average amount of time your visitors spent looking at each page before moving on to another page.
The Visit Exit Point shows the last page that your visitors looked at before leaving your Web site.
The Peak Hourly Bandwidth report shows which one hour periods during the time covered by the report had the highest number of bytes transferred. This is displayed in several formats including the average number of bits per second (BPS) over the hour.
The Top Referrer Report tells you who the servers were that sent visitors to your Web site. You can tell if it was through a search engine or a Web site that you are linked to. Oftentimes, search engines will send out spiders to view your Web site and they are listed here also.
The Top URL Report shows you which pages received the most hits each month. By clicking on an individual URL you are presented with more detailed information about the visit.
As you can see there is a wealth of information to be gleaned from your Web Traffic Logs. It is just a matter of understanding the information presented.
