Web log analysis - more important than it sounds!

[SCUBA]

I am new to this forum, but I would like to offer some of my experiences with personal web sites, Google Ads, and web log analyzers.

For my first personal website dealing with our villa, I used Microsoft’s FrontPage. I strongly recommend purchasing a template for your first web site. It offers an easy way to learn the basics. Believe me, it is very intimidating to buy web page development software, start with a blank page, and say to yourself “I spent $XXX for this?� Fabio Ciucci has developed some great software for picture fading http://www.anfyflash.com/gallery/imagefader/index.html which I used inside of FrontPage to show different snapshots of our villa, ocean views, and sunsets. It is much easier to use than Macromedia’s Flash. For my present websites, one of which is www.oceanside-tower.com I used Macromedia’s Dreamweaver for the page development, Fireworks for the graphics, and Flash for the animation. Dreamweaver had a steep learning curve at first (much like AutoCAD is to engineers and architects) but I would not use anything else now.

I feel Google Ads are the best kept secret on the Internet – and I hope they stay that way for a while. For pennies per click, you get your listing on the first page of almost every keyword search that describes your villa. Since February 9, 2004 my ad has appeared on 308,200 Google search pages and has been clicked a total of 3,231 times (about 1%) at 5 cents per click or a total of US$161. My web site traffic doubled from January to February 2004. My web site traffic tripled in September 2004 over what is was in September 2003. So I am a very firm advocate of Google Ads.

One subject that I have not seen discussed here has to do with web log analyzers. I feel it is extremely important for anyone with a personal web site to know the number of visits, the number of page views, the demographics of your visitors, the referring page to your website and many more important facts about your web site visitors. I use SurfStats, www.surfstats.com to analyze my log files. This has been an excellent tool to measure the effect of the Google Ads. I know the most popular countries my viewers are residing, how long they spend viewing my website, the previous web site before clicking on my URL, and what search words they used to find my website.

[Linda Freese]

Dear Scuba

I am very interested in your comment re. surf stats and have had a look at the site you recommend. Excuse my ignorance, but can you explain to me how this would work. It all sounds very technical!

When you buy the product do they send you a link which you then download onto your pc? Does that mean that the programme is then on your pc and you can apply it to all your personal websites or does it mean that you can only use it on one specific site? Apologies for all the questions but I am intrigued and confused!

Thanks

Linda

[SCUBA]

Hello Linda

There are two different scenarios for hosting your web site, and I will try to address each as they pertain to Windows operating systems. One option is have your own server(s) to host your own web site, while the other is to have someone else (such as your Internet Service Provider) host your web site. In both of these cases, the system administrator can set the server to log the activity of the visitor(s). The level of logging is dependent upon how much information you want to collect which is directly related to the size of the log file that will be generated.

If you have your own web server, you direct SurfStats (which is installed on your PC) to the location of your log file(s) on your server (or your PC if you decided to copy them from the server), and it correlates the information to produce the SurfStats reports.

If you have someone else host your web site, have them mail or email the log files to you. Some sites may allow you to FTP to their site in order for you to download your log files. Once you receive the log files, you direct SurfStats (which is installed on your PC) to the location of your log file(s) on your PC, and it correlates the information to produce the SurfStats reports.

I use the Standard Edition of SurfStats, and it allows up to 10 different web sites and can be set to one of eight different languages. I presently run three web sites on three different servers in three different geographic locations. Via the Microsoft scheduler, I download my logs automatically each night from the servers to my PC that runs SurfStats. Once the SurfStats database has been setup, or appended, I can view the data as set by the calendar. For instance, I may want to see only the traffic in the past 3 days, or last week, or the first week of the year, or the year to date, or the entire log from the start to present, etc. It can be displayed as daily activity or monthly activity. You can set filters so that visits to your website by you or your constituents are filtered out by ip address or domain name. You can also filter out visits from bots.

The data that I collect and analyze from the logs includes: number of unique visits, number of pages viewed, time spend viewing the web site, the most popular pages, the most popular images, the referral web page such as Google, AOL, Yahoo, your property manager’s web page, etc. so I can see what web site the visitor came from to see my site. I find the referral feature to be most helpful in determining the value of advertising on various web sites. If www.TheBestVillaRentalReferralOnEarth.com is not referring visitors to my web site, I do not renew my subscription with them.

The software comes with a DNS reverse lookup feature. This allows you to see the domain name of the visitor as opposed to just the ip address the server collects for the log. Knowing the domain name, SurfStats displays the countries your visitors are located.

I know this is a long answer, but I hope it can help you, or someone else, by providing these details. Although this answer applies specifically to Windows and SurfStats, the general logging and analysis procedures hold true for other operating systems and web log software.

[paolo]

Another way to go is to pick a web host that includes analysis of your site visitors. I only have experience of www.ipowerweb.com and I am very happy with them. You get a mass of stats to look at. The most useful for me are:

- breakdown of visitor numbers and which web page they came from
- which pages are looked at the most, and from which pages visitors leave the site altogether.
- which words and phrases are being used to find the site on a search engine

Web hosting is a very competitive market and I am sure there are many providers offering the same thing for a good price. I paid about $120 for a year, and this included the domain registration.

A package like SurfStats will probably give you more in-depth information, but for our purposes you may not need everything it offers. There is a free demo at SurfStats so you can take a look at what you would get.

[Tom]

Could you explain a little about why we need to know this stuff? How can we use this information to our advantage?

Thanks!
Tom

[paolo]

Could you explain a little about why we need to know this stuff? How can we use this information to our advantage?

Hi Tom,

SCUBA will be able to give you a better and fuller answer, but here is what I find useful in the site statistics I get.

- Monitoring inbound links to my site.
Link popularity is, along with site content, the most important factor in your search engine rankings.

- Seeing where people are exiting the site.
I would expect people to leave either at the homepage (because they decide the site is not for them), or at the rates page (because they don't like the price), or at the contact page (because they have sent me an email). Obviously some people will leave at other pages too, but if there is a significant number leaving from a page other than these, there may be a problem which you can fix - for instance a picture that is taking an eternity to download, text too small to read, confusing layout, etc.

- Words and phrases that were used to find your site on search engines.
Gives you an indication of which phrases to repeat in your copy and target for pay per click. But it is just an indication, because it will only show the best of the phrases that are already on your site. Any phrase that you are not using but should be will not show up.

I also like to look at the brightly coloured 'skyscraper' graphs that show visitor breakdowns, stroke my chin and think 'Hmmm, June not as good as July, wonder why?' and come up with a reason that is almost certainly complete nonsense.

[tansy]

We watched a TV programme over the weekend that said that the statistics show that during the hurricanes in Florida the spam mails made a very dramatic drop...unfortuately we are all back to the monotonous daily barrage of qualifications, increased drive/size/drugs etc.

But I'm afraid the technical information has convinced me I should get someone who knows what they are doing to build a site for me - so is anyone offering this service? I would like to be able to updte it myself a later dates.

Many thanks in anticipation.

[paolo]

Hi Tansy,

I've sent you a private message about this. (You need to be logged in and click on 'You have 1 new message' near the top.)

[Sue Dyer]

Tansy - I think a website can be as simple or complex as you make it - it's whatever works for you and your bookings.

I maybe don't anaylse as much as I could but I'm pretty happy with my bookings. I use free counters from www.bravenet.com - you just need to register. You can have up to three so I have one on my first page and one on the page with my rates and availbility. You can get 7 days comparisons for first time visitors, returning and unique visitors in a chart form.
They also have all sorts of free add on's like guest books and the like.
Good luck whatever you choose to do!!

[Hanorah]

Hi I am just wondering what would be considered a decent amount of visits (not hits per day). I started out last year and made number 2 in Google for a while when Yahoo still owned it, but have since disapeared into the Abyss. Intrestinly most of my stats indicate that Google is a frequent referrer abeit the foreign versions not .co.uk or .com

I am still number 12 on yahoo.co.uk for Turkish Villa Rentals but again was much higher in the beginning.

My number of site visits per day has increased from 17 since Oct 03 to to 63 to the present day.

I must admit I had ignored my website for a while until recently so guess this must have had an adverse effect.

I revised on keywords and robot txt etc in the beginning and have now added a links page, google search engine and site map (thanks to the hints on this site) to try and increase my page rank on Google which is currently 3. I do beleive that I am ok on content as I have a lot on my site. My web design might let me down though as I am self taught and used a template.

Back to my question should I be expecting more a year later down the line. I must admit that as far as I am aware no one has actually booked due to a search engine but this may because I do not currently offer online booking and they may then do a search on the villa name.

Any advice on this would be gratefully received.

[Alan Knighting]

For those who have their own websites and like to keep up with "hits" the following may be useful:-

Free ASP Hit Counter Code

Here is an ASP-based hit counter written using VBscript that you are welcome to use on your own site. The counter requires an ODBC connection on the server named counter with a uid 'mycounter' and password 'mypassword'. Adjust the uid and password to whatever you configure in the ODBC connection. Also, the IF statement in the script checks the client IP address and adds the hit to the database only if it comes from outside your own network. You need to change the values in the script for your own public IP address and the private subnet (if your server is on your local network) according to your own network's values. (Browse to www.boyce.us and look in the status bar to find your public IP address.) Delete the IF and End If statements if you want to record all hits, regardless of source. Check out www.dynu.com if you would like to add the capability to perform reverse lookup to resolve the IP address to a host name. You can download a copy of the database here. Enjoy!

- Jim



' Hit counter by Jim Boyce, www.boyce.us
MM_counter_STRING = "dsn=counter;uid=mycounter;pwd=mypassword;"
Dim clientIPAddress
Dim clientBrowser
Dim clientReferrer
Dim pageURL
clientIPAddress = Request.ServerVariables ("REMOTE_ADDR")
' Exclude hits from your own network, change IP addresses to suit your network
If clientIPAddress <> "216.239.31.4" and left(clientIPAddress,7) <> "192.168" then
clientBrowser = Request.ServerVariables ("HTTP_USER_AGENT")
clientReferrer = Request.ServerVariables ("HTTP_REFERER")
pageUrl = Request.ServerVariables ("HTTP_URL")
set cn = Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Command")
cn.ActiveConnection = MM_counter_STRING
cn.CommandText = "INSERT INTO Hits (page, clientIPAddress, clientBrowser, clientReferrer) VALUES ("&"'"&pageURL&"'"&","&"'"&clientIPAddress&"'"&","&"'"&clientBrowser&"'"&","&"'"&clientReferrer&"'"&")"
cn.Execute
cn.ActiveConnection.Close
End If
set cn = nothing

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Alan

[paolo]

If you'd like to know about the basics of web stats analysis and why it is useful to you, here is a good, easy-to-understand walk-through:

What's the Score? Basic Web Analytic Terminology

[rachel]

If you're looking to compile a list of useful website stats counters, the one that I use is statcounter.com. Not only is this free, but you don't need to advertise it on your site either.

This site is only free for the 1st 100 hits, then the cache is emptied, but for me it is enough to show which sites are referring visitors to us - it helps to convince me which advertising sites are providing value for money. The other feature that helps advertising is the keyword analysis - you can see which keywords are making users visit your site and improve your Google CCP.

The other useful feature is that you can list the IP addresses that you don't wish to count - my PC, my PC at work, my partners in the villa, etc, so the 100 hits excludes the regular users!

Rache