November 19, 2004

You have invested considerable amounts of money in search engine optimization for your website. You might even participate in a PPC (Pay-per-Click) campaign or other forms of advertising. Yet, you would like to know just who, when, how and where did they go while visiting your site. Maybe you are also asking yourself the eternal question: Did they buy from me? If not, why did they leave without buying anything?

After being in this business for more than 6 years, I still can’t understand why it is that so few site owners, business administrators and even many Webmasters don’t look at their server logs more often and, most importantly, more closely. Few seem to realize that there is a “diamond mine” of information residing in those log files. All it takes is to retrieve them and analyze them, at least once a week, at a minimum. If you can look at them everyday, it’s even better.

A primer on server log files
First, let’s rewind back to 1994-1995. In the mid-90’s, when the Internet was still relatively young, commercially that is, most site owners and Webmasters were mostly interested in the number of “hits” their site got, from one day to the next. Even today, I still get asked: "How many hits did I get today?" By talking with some of these clients, I realize that they need a little primer article, such as this one, in helping them better understand the importance of professional analytics and measurements of Web traffic, site demographics, geo-location data, statistics, etc.

Today, modern traffic analysis tools and complex analytical software applications can yield far beyond this rudimentary, basic information. The more information a business administrator can have at his or her fingertips, the more he or she can use it to their best advantage over their competitors. Plus, there are many other benefits to be had as an added bonus. If some executives within your organization would like to know exactly how some visitors behave once they are inside your site, they can now get access to this kind of information, with a good analytical package.

Additionally, one of the most important features of most of the good packages I have seen is the “link referrer” information. As it’s name implies, the link referrer information will clearly identify the search engine that brought you that visitor, or if it’s a link from one of your affiliate’s sites or a site that links back to you. What’s more, when properly configured, the search engine referrer log will even tell you which specific keywords or key phrases they entered to find your site.

The importance of error logs
Another often-overlooked and neglected area is the error log. It's an excellent way to discover problems with your website before a visitor mentions it to you. A good example is when you find “error 404” or “file not found” in your error logs. When added with the site referrer information, you are also able to discover which page caused the error. This feature alone makes it a lot simpler to correct this problem.

With today’s most popular Web hosting packages offered on the market, many of them provide some kind of server log files that one can analyze and evaluate. You should ask your Web hosting provider for that information.

Conclusion
Frequent and regular server log file analysis and monitoring can be a very valuable source of important website information in deed, if done correctly. It can mean all the difference between discovering that a site has little or no ROI and one that truly achieves the best overall value for any size business. There are very simple and inexpensive server log analytical programs and software available today. Some are even free. As with anything, you can also purchase expensive software suites that are more suited for a larger enterprise. It all depends on your needs and budget.

(Updated from my January 2001 article).

Article written by Serge Thibodeau,
President & CEO,
Rank for $ales
Copyright (c) Serge Thibodeau 2001

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