Traffic Building

Analyzing Web Site Traffic

There are many reasons that your company would want to analyze web site traffic. First and foremost you want to make sure that your web site is attracting visitors and weather the investments you are making, both in time and money are paying off.

Next you want to look into web site trends, for instance what type of traffic your web site is generating and where that traffic is coming from. This is especially useful to determine if your keywords are paying off, or if you have paid for any type of advertising that you are receiving your moneys worth.

Another important aspect of traffic analysis is determining which pages users are visiting most often, and how long your visitors are staying on your web site.

Finally you want to make sure that the goals you have decided for your web site are paying off. If one of the primary goals of your web site is lead generation or appointment setting you want to make sure that the type of traffic you are generating to your site is paying off.

How Can Information About Your Web Site Traffic Be Collected?

Web Server Log Files

When you visit a web site you actually connect with a web server on the internet that is delivering content (HTML files, image files, etc..) that makes up the pages you are viewing. The web server creates a log of the files that your system requests, when they where requested, your IP address, and the page or web site that referred you.

With such logging in place it doesn't take long for these logs to grow to unmanageable proportions, even for the smallest of web sites. It would be impossible to extract any useful information by studying these logs directly.

This is where a log file analysis solution can come in handy. These solutions take the raw log files and convert them into meaningful information about web site traffic. Since web site logs can be configured to contain important information such as the pages requested, the previous page visited (including key words used to search with), date and time, IP address of your visitor (this will give us information on location and more..) it's possible to get a clear picture of your Web site visitors and their actions on your site .

Page Tags

The page tagging approach to Web site traffic analysis consists of embedding a special file on each Web page for the sole purpose of tracking the visitors who requested it. A JavaScript "tag" is embedded in the source code for each page of your Web site you wish to track, composed of an invisible, zero-pixel image hosted on a server which logs requests. When a page is viewed and a request is made to your page-tagging server for the image, the request contains a query string which includes the page being requested, the referring page, the screen resolution of the visitor, and so on. This information can then be analyzed and used to create Web traffic reports.

Additionally, you can use this approach to track things other than page views. "Event tags" can be placed on the Web site to track on-page events like products being removed from shopping carts before checkout, fields being left blank on an online form, and how far into a particular page your Web site visitors have scrolled. Page tagging can also gather information not found in log files, like screen resolution.

Cookies

A cookie is a small piece of information generated by the Web server and stored on the client machine. Advanced Web site analysis solutions offer the option to use cookies to get much more accurate visitor counts, while also allowing analysis of repeat visitors.

Advanced Web site analysis solutions will capture this cookie information and use it to accurately calculate unique visitors. Also, you will notice that in our first example the browser did not send a cookie to the Web server, while for subsequent requests it did. By analyzing requests where the browser did not have a cookie for the first request, software can determine when a visitor comes to the site for the first time. This allows for analysis of new visitors compared to repeat visitors.

E-Mail Campaigns

With more and more companies turning to e-mail marketing, either to prospective clients or through opt-in e-mail databases it has become very important that companies are able to track how their e-mail campaigns are paying off. Utilizing advanced software and URL redirects companies are able to track exactly which users opened their e-mail message and how many users who opened the e-mail message visited your web site.

How Does Web Site Traffic Analysis Software Work?

Web site tracking typically consists of three stages: gathering the data, analyzing the data, and reporting on the data.

The data gathering stage differs from solution to solution depending on how the data is collected. For log file analysis solutions, this stage consists of parsing the log files into a common format at scheduled intervals. For page tagging solutions, this stage consists of monitoring which tags are sent across the network. Another method of collecting data is through server plug-ins: modules written to extend the Web server's functionality which take the data in real time, before it is written to the log file, and pass it along to the analysis stage.

Once the data has been gathered from log files, page tags, or server plug-ins, it needs to be analyzed. During the data analysis stage, complex heuristics are applied to the raw data to categorize the data into visits and page views instead of simply hits. This analysis might be based on the IP address of the visitor or, for more accurate calculations, be based on cookie data. Once the data has been analyzed it is typically placed in a database to facilitate reporting.

The final stage of Web site tracking is generating reports from the analyzed data. During this stage the analyzed visit and page view data is read from the database and tabulated into many different reports, each answering a specific question. For example, a report on what people have viewed on a Web site might consist of the top ten pages that were viewed, how many times each page has been viewed, and how long, on average, visitors spent looking at each page. Graphs and charts are also generated during this stage.

What Web Site Traffic Analysis Software Is Available To Me?

In-House Software

In the early days of the Internet, companies had to write their own software to analyze their Web site traffic. Even today, companies will still write their own software to meet their highly specific requirements.

This software, often written in PERL (a text manipulation language), tends to be costly and time consuming to produce and support. Plus, it does not have the general functionality of commercial software and often does not conform to industry standards.

Shareware / Freeware / Open-Source

These solutions are inexpensive web site traffic analysis solutions for many companies. Most have many options available in commercial software and are constantly under development and improved upon monthly. However, larger more complex sites might require technical support and or features not available in standard open source of freeware type traffic analysis software.

Commercial Software

With its abundance of features, commercial Web site traffic analysis software soon became the logical next step for online marketers. Commercial software's ability to determine visits and visitors provided much more valuable information than hits.

Most commercial software products offer advanced user-interfaces to include graphs, calendars, and visual reports such as funnel reports and path reports. Most have online help and provide technical support via phone and e-mail.

Basic desktop solutions are relatively inexpensive and can be run on a personal computer. These solutions almost always utilize Web server log files for analysis. Users must download their log files from their Web server to their desktop in order or analyze them. So, depending on the size of your log files and the speed of your Internet connection, it may take a while to download and process your log files to create reports.

Server software requires more sophisticated hardware, specifically a Web server. The advantages are that you do not have to download your log files or page tag data, and since you have a more powerful computer, you will be able to process your Web traffic data much faster. In addition, since this Web server is most likely connected to the Internet, you can make your Web site traffic reports available to anyone within your organization that has access to the Internet.