Success Online.IN Success Secrets For Your Online Venture

Analyzing traffic that comes to your website is a very integral part of your online marketing plan. By looking at your server logs through Graphical Statistic softwares you can gain a lot of insight, like -

1. See where your traffic is coming from – country, and referring websites.

2. Track visitor flow on your websites, that is what page to what page do they travel

3. Find out which pages or products / services of your website are popular and promote them more.

4. Get detailed reports such as average times spent on your site, most accessed pages, error pages, total data transfer, hourly, weekly, monthly traffic reports, etc.

There are many softwares available that can help you do this. If you are hosting your website with a good hosting company – the statistics software should be included in your package at no extra charge, like Webalizer (Web Analyzer). Although these logging softwares may not be able to analyze and provide you with some indepth information like time spent of pages, travel paths, etc. In order to see Webalizer statistics, you do not need to insert any special invisible code in the pages of your website in order to get statistics, since Webalizer simply analyzing your webservers log files. This has its limitations as explained above, and it may not give you realtime traffic analysis.

If you need realtime and very comprehensive analysis of your visitors, you can try one of the many free and paid third party statistic tracking services like http://www.statcounter.com/, http://www.hitbox.com/ or http://www.sitemeter.com/ . Some offer free basic packages and start charging only once you cross a certain level of monthly site traffic. There are a few good free web statistic servcies too. Try googling “free site counter” or “free site stats”. Most of the free services you find will require you to put a small visible button somewhere on your pages (for example, in the footer) – so they get free viral publicity in return for providing you the free service.

What are server logs (raw log files)?

Server logs are flat text files with data that are created in your server space when people visit your website. When you install and run a Web Statistics software on your server (example – WebAnalyzer), the software in essence reads these data files (server logs) and analyzes them to produce graphical and / or text information for you to see. The information is well formatted so you can understand and get a lot of insight for your business.

When you market your site and submit links to various engines or inside newsletters or message board postings – you should put tracer links so you can later look at the web statistics to see which links bring in more traffic for you. A tracer link may look like this … www.yoursite.com/ref.asp?re=email10-2-2003

If you have a newsletter that goes out to your community you can include the above link in it, and if people click on it to come to your site, you will be able to see just how many people accessed / clicked on this link to come to your site. This is because the website statistic software knows the “referrer” or link that got the visitor to your site.

This type of tracking is very important and useful, and is carried out extensively by large sites. It gives one a very good insight and helps make better decisions based on past statistics / results.

Using Raw Log Files for tracking

When you advertise on somebody elses website, you may want to keep your own check on how many times your ad is shown, even though the other site has their own control panel through which you can access this data. All you need to do to accomplish this is to store the actual banner ad – that is, the .gif file – on your server / website. Then if a remote site calls it, it will be shown as a hit in your raw log files and you can thus measure how many times your banner .gif file is served and displayed on the remote server / website.

Keep checking your server logs (or third party hosted statistics),  so you know exactly where your visitor traffic is coming from – and this will tell you how effective each of your different methods are. Most of the times, you can embed unique links into each campaign that your setup – and hence track flow from each one. On many occasions, the campaign you run will provide you with an option to track impressions and click-throughs.

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