Free Internet Marketing Lessons

by Robin Nobles

Congratulations! Your hard work and persistence in optimizing your pages have resulted in a dramatic increase in traffic to your site, which is just what you wanted.

But, are you analyzing that traffic and using it to strengthen your site? Or, are you quickly glancing at your log files every week or so to see how much traffic you're getting, and letting it go at that?

Before we go on, let's define exactly what log files are.

When someone visits your Web Site, server software counts and tracks, i.e. "logs," that visit. It also keeps a record of it for a certain period of time. Part of the saved information is called a referrer log.

Referrer logs can help you analyze the traffic to your site. Though each referrer 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;
* 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;
* Bandwidth, which is the measure (in kilobytes of data transferred) of the traffic on the site; and,
* Type of technology used by your visitors.


But why is it so important to study your traffic? Isn't it enough to know that your traffic is increasing, without having to spend valuable time analyzing it?

Think about it this way. If you know which engines are sending you the most traffic, you can boost your optimization 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.

Through your referrer logs, you'll probably discover that you're getting found through keyword phrases that you haven't even considered before. In that case, you certainly don't want to change those pages and lose the traffic. By the same token, if you're getting found under a keyword phrase in one engine, wouldn't it be worth creating pages for the other engines for that same keyword phrase to see if you can bring in some additional traffic?

You can also find out through which pages you are losing visitors. This begs the questions; Why are you losing visitors?, ... and what changes can you make to keep them from leaving?

Simply put, a referrer log can give you an enormous amount of information and can serve as a road map for future changes to your site.

So, how can you view your referrer 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 entry:

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%2fnov %2f99&q=email+marketing%2a +AND+email marketing%2a&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 to you, you can easily see that it requires a little effort to analyze it yourself. If you're serious about analyzing your traffic, consider obtaining a quality log analysis software program. Examples of programs are listed at the bottom of this article.


When analyzing your referrer log information, what should you look for?

* Number of page views per day Page views (or page impressions) refer to how many "hits" your site has had to HTML pages only. A hit is an action on a web page, such as when a user views a web page.

* Number of user sessions per day User session refers to the activity of one visitor to a web site.

* How long users are staying on your pages How long did the users stay at your Web site? Are they finding what they're looking for, or are they getting frustrated and leaving? If visitors are immediately clicking out of your site, maybe it's time to set up an onsite search engine. After all, once you get visitors to your site, you want them to be able to find what they're looking for.

Ginette Degner, Professional Optimizer with SearchEngineServices.com, adds,

"The time users spend at a site tells me if they are actually reading the site or just clicking in only to leave immediately. Perhaps I am not conveying the purpose of the site well enough to make them stay. Or, I am listed under the wrong phrases. If I am buying traffic from GoTo or another engine, I like to know if the words I chose are valuable to me or just a waste."

* Most requested and least requested pages Degner further explains, "Which page is attracting the most visits and how long are they there? This helps me decide what areas of a site need to be expanded upon and what areas can be dropped. For an example with a sports picks site, we found that the least visited page was the record the handicapper used to show everyone his win/lose ratio for picks and the chat room. So we dropped the page and spent the programming money on live scores and a sports news page."

(This article will be continued in Part 2)

This article was written by Robin Nobles, a professional freelance writer and the Director of Training at the Academy of Web Specialists (http://www.academywebspecialists.com). Over the past few years, she has trained over 1000 people in her online and onsite courses in search engine positioning strategies and has written three books that can be ordered through Amazon. Visit the Academy's training Web site to learn more about their online courses: http://www.onlinewebtraining.com.