Analysing traffic

by Mofaz
20 May 2005

An important aspect of managing internet business is assessing the traffic to your website. At the most basic level, this can be done quiet easily by inserting 'hit counter' in your pages. You can assess the popularity of a particular page by seeing the number displayed on the counter. However, to really fine tune the performance of your website is to go into deeper understanding of the traffic pattern. In fact this can be the most important aspect in commercial web management. Why is it important?

A good analysis of the traffic to your website will reveal these information:

As you can see, the above information will give you answers to pertinent questions business people ask, e.g. What do people want and willing to pay for? What turn people off from buying? What  are the best ways to close deal?..etc.

So how do you analyse your traffic?

All the activities incurred by your website will be archived in a web log on the server of your host. Depending on your arrangement with the server, you can download the web log onto your own computer for your viewing. Below is an example of a web log file from this website, viewed in a browser.

Its not much fun is it? We will see later how these data can be analysed intuitively b using proprietary tools. For now here is the explanation: By looking at each line the data tells you every activity incurred by your website. You can start seeing dates, URL and other numbers on each line. Let me explain the details.

Below is an example of one line from the web log (I have broken the line into four digestible sections) :

The first line shows the IP address of the viewer computer and the date and time of activity. The second line shows the command activated by the viewer, in this case to get the page greenliving.htm. The number 200 indicates it was a successful request. The third line shows the website from which the page was linked to and the last line shows the browser type the viewer used.

Now you have seen it clearer, but still, how do you make sense out of it when there are thousands of lines to be read? Fortunately, there are tools available to digest all these information and produce a comprehensible reports with charts, table etc. THere are some software you can purchase, but for a start, try the freeware available on the net. You can try analog 6.0. It is a good web log analyzer, although it's quite technical, the manual are available in the download

In conclusion, traffic report analysis is a very important aspect of internet business management. It will reveal the weakness or the strength of your marketing activities. Well tuned traffic marketing strategy may well save you a significant amount of money, on top of generating the intended income.

The end

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