WEB LOGS, WEB STATISTICS AND COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE

A web log is simply a file that records each time someone requests one of your web pages and the files associated with it (i.e. graphics, audio, banner ads, buttons, etc..).

As stated earlier, the web logs are supplied by your web host and they contain tons of critical information that you can use to sharpen and focus your marketing strategy to explode your online sales.

web logs can help you analyze the traffic to your site. Though each web log program provides slightly different data, some of the more common information includes:

• Which engines have sent you traffic;
• What keywords were used to find your site;
• which pages were accessed the most or the least;
• Who are the visiting spiders;
• User profile by region;
• What days and hours are most popular at your site;
• Average length of time someone remains on your site;
• Average number of user sessions or page views per day;
• Top entry and exit pages;
• Top referring sites;
• Summary of activity by day;
• Server errors;
• What error messages your visitors are getting;
• Bandwidth, which is the measure (in kilobytes of data transferred) of the traffic on the site;
• Which operating systems visitors are using (i.e. Windows95,98,2000,Mac, etc..);and,
• Which browsers your visitors are using.

From this information You'll be able to...

• Adjust your web site layout to eliminate any problems or snags that might be frustrating your visitors, causing them to leave and never come back!
• Tweak your sales copy and content to reflect your visitor's interests, so you'll keep visitors at your site longer and start closing more sales!
• Know exactly which advertising is paying off, and which is a waste of your advertising budget!

..this is just for starters! Do not take this information lightly your web logs can give you a clear picture of...

1. Which Search Engines bring your site the most visitors. You can boost your optimisation strategies for those engines by creating additional pages for other relevant keyword phrases. This could increase your traffic even more.

Or, if you know that you're not getting any traffic at all from a particular engine, you'll be able to consider strategies for findability on that engine.

2. What keywords visitors search in the search engines to find your site.
Through your web logs, you'll probably discover that you're getting found through keyword phrases that you haven't even considered before. In that case, you don't want to change those pages and lose the traffic. Also, if you're getting found under a keyword phrase in one engine, you could create pages for the other engines for that same keyword phrase to see if it brings in some additional traffic.

Optimising your web site for a "Top Ten" ranking is much easier when you know which keywords people are searching for. You'll know exactly what keywords to focus on when designing your Meta-tags, title, content, etc...

3. Which linking partners are bringing you the most sales. You'll know who is sending you a lot of traffic...and who is sending you none at all! You may be surprised at what you learn; you could be paying for a link that's bringing you zero traffic!

4. Which of your advertising and promotion tactics are paying off. With this info, you can stop paying for advertising that doesn't bring paying customers... and focus on the ads that earn you the biggest profits.

5. How long your visitors are staying. Are they spending 10 minutes surfing through your site or are they leaving in less than 30 seconds? With this information, you'll know...

1. If your page is taking too long to load, frustrating visitors and causing them to leave.
2. Whether or not your headlines and opening paragraph are capturing your visitors' interest and attention or sending them away!
3. If your traffic is targeted or just a bunch of "tire kickers". You may need to re-examine how and where you are advertising to start drawing higher traffic.

Your web logs will let you know where the problems are.. so you can fix them right away and stop losing sales!

6. which pages your visitors are most interest in. This helps you in deciding what areas of your site need to be expanded upon and what areas can be dropped. For example, you could save valuable programming or advertising resources in dropping a page that isn't receiving much traffic and expanding those that were attracting most traffic.

7. Top entry pages. How are people first coming to your site? Which pages are bringing you the most traffic? What about some of your other pages? What can you do to make them top entry pages too?.

8. Top exit pages Exit pages are another important area of your log file. Where are they leaving? What off site link are they clicking on the most? If this is an intro page or another sub page that is a doorway, you may need to get rid of it or use a redirect, it tells you that you are losing visitors.

9. Most active countries. If you want to corner the international market, study this data carefully. How many user sessions are being generated for each country that's important to your business? How you can beef up efforts to improve those members? Are you creating highly targeted information pages for your international keywords?

10. Browsers used by your visitors check this section periodically to make sure that the technology offered at your web site can be used by the majority of your visitors. Namely, if many of your visitors are accessing the web using older browsers, you will want to be careful about using technology that will prevent them from fully utilising your web site.

11. Errors, such as 404 pages. If your visitors encounter too many error messages when visiting your web site, they'll assume that you don't do your "house cleaning," and the professional image of your site will plummet several notches.

HOW CAN YOU VIEW AND INTERPRET YOU WEB LOGS?

Ask your Internet service Provider (ISP) to provide referrer logs in extended log format. However, even if your provider captures referrer information, you may want to get a program to read it, since the raw data can be a little cumbersome to analyze.

Here's an example of such an enter:

216.219.177.29 - - [15/May/2000:23:03:36 -0800] "GET /index.htm
HTTP/1.0" 200 3956 "http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi- bin/query?
pg=aq&text=yes&d0=1/nov /99&q=email+marketing
+AND+email marketing &stq=30" "Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.0;
SK; Windows 98)"

Not exactly easy reading, is it?

Though the information in the raw data provides invaluable information, it requires a little effort to analyse it yourself. If you're are serious about analysing your traffic, consider obtaining a quality log analysis software program. Examples of programs are given below:

• WebTrends
• 
  
  
• FlashStats
• 
  
  
• Analog (free web stats)
• 
  
  
• Webalizer (free web stats)
• 
  
  
• eXTReMe Tracking (free)

CLOSING ADVICE ON WEB SITE ANALYSIS

Keep track of when a spider hits your site and how deep and compare it to the dates you submit and the dates the pages actually appear in the index. You will start to see a pattern emerge with seach engine. It will help you to time your submissions and know when to expect results.

when you are stumped as to why none of the words you optimized for are hitting, look at the logs. Use the words you see actually hitting with the search engines in your reporting files (e.g. web Position Gold). It can open your eyes and help you find more avenues of traffic.

If you want your site to be successful, then you need to correctly analyze your server logs. Without them, you have no way of accurately tracking your visitors. Take time to analyze your traffic, and then put that valuable information to work on your web site and reap the benefits of even more traffic.

Without getting into technical details, you should know that if you have a large web site or lots of traffic, your web logs are going to be very large and take a long time to download..never mind analyse. If this is the case, then you may wish to consider hiring the services of a third party web log analyser. It will save you time and money! Plus, we can often give you more immediate feedback on the success of ad campaigns or promotions you're running.

Word of Advice: Do not make your web site publicly available online until you are 100% ready. Do you really want to announce yourself to the world until you have proven yourself? Take it one step at a time. Initially what you should be most concerned with is NOT your total volume of traffic. You should be carefully watching your visitor-to-sales conversion rate; this is how you will know whether or not you are ready to go public.

For a free initial consultation on "Testing, Surveying, and Tracking," to dramatically improve your online marketing strategy contact

Competitive intelligence