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Web Log Stats Analysers

What would you say if I told you that you already had all the information you needed to make your website a huge success, the best that it can be? You'd probably think I was mad. But it's true. Your web server log files contain so much more information than you would think. I want to show you how to utilise this free information so that you can work effectively and intelligently, how to use it so that you can find out exactly what changes you need to make to start earning serious amounts of money. So many people ask for advice on how to start earning serious money from their website or how to generate more hits, but unless you are monitoring your progress, you'll get nowhere.

Big companies don't just try to sell a load of products and then let their accounts sort out the tax forms at the end of the year and work out if they're still in business. They constantly analyse how they are doing, what techniques are selling the most, which avenues are generating the best leads, which staff are the most profitable and then they act on this information to improve their sales and increase their margins. You can do the same for your business so easily but so many people ignore the vital information that they can get for free. This information is almost always the key to your success. Without analysing your stats, everything else is pointless. You can have all the adverts you want, sign up to all the affiliate schemes, offer a huge range of products, but unless you know what exactly is generating your sales, you'll be second best to those people who smarter instead of harder.

Your web stats are not there to make pretty graphs or to show you "interesting" information about your visitors. The information is there so that you can see what works, what doesn't work and what to do more of to earn more, get more hits or do whatever you are trying to do. You can't just create your website and sit back and relax. Well, you can, but you'll get nowhere. If for some reason you are using a web host that doesn't supply you with any raw apache log files, ditch them, they are useless. You need access to your log files, don't accept anything less. Stored in your log files is a record of everything your visitors have done, where they came from, how they found you and what things attracted them and what things didn't. The information is all there if you know how to get it and what to do with it. I want to show you how to turn your website into a powerhouse of profit and you can only do that by analysing how well your website is working and making the right changes.

If you have any kind of self respecting web host, they'll also host one of the many free web-based web log analysers. The usefulness of these is limited, but as you should get them for free, I'll discuss the two most popular.

Webalizer

Webalizer does the standard thing of showing you how many hits you had per month, how many kilobytes you sent, how many individual pages and an estimate of how many actual visitors (a hit is not a visitor, a visitor visiting one page will generate a hit for that page plus a hit for every image on that page). It can even show you a nice graph of these figures over 12 months. Woo hoo. So now you know how popular your site is and how seasonal that is. Wrong! Visitors are not your popularity. It's no good having millions of visitors if they all look at your first page and then go somewhere else. Your visitor numbers are nice to know, but meaningless in reality. They're just good for bragging to your mates. After this, you can get a more granular break down of these figures with daily averages. Again, not a lot of use. Of slightly more use is the number of hits by response codes. You are aiming for mostly code 200s (OK) and 304s (not modified). This means no problems. Any other codes can signify missing links, broken CGI scripts or bad security. Unfortunately, you don't get any more information on this, so you have to just use your best guess as to what's wrong if your figures don't look quite right.

Webalizer will also show you your most viewed pages, but unfortunately, it's not clever enough to filter out your images so your main logo and other images are likely to be in your top ten "visited pages". But at least if you ignore those, you can get an idea of what most visitors are doing. If you have your "contact us" page quite high up, maybe your site isn't intuitive enough, are people wasting your time asking too many questions. It will also show you your top ten visited pages by kilobytes. This is useful if you think you are paying too much for bandwidth. If you can cut down the size of your top ten pages by kilobytes, you'll make real progress. The top ten entry pages shows what is the first page most of your visitors see. This is useful because you now know which pages you need to focus on and gear towards grabbing peoples attention as soon as possible. People make up their mind about your site in less than 2-3 seconds, so this first page is essential. Get them right. The top ten exit pages is also useful. If you have pages that are in your top ten entry AND top ten exit pages, chances are, you're not grabbing your visitors attention on these pages and they're leaving too soon. You can ignore pages here that you would expect people to leave from, for example, the last page in a payment process or something similar.

Webalizer will give you a list of your top referrers. This is where your visitors came from before they arrived at a particular page. Hopefully, most of the time it will be other pages on your site, this means people are moving around your site, checking things out, maybe buying things. You can also see what other sites are sending visitors to you. No doubt, Google and other search engines will appear highly. If not, fix your search rankings. Check out the Website Promotion and SEO section for more information on doing this. Webalizer also makes an attempt to work out the top search strings that visitors used in search engines to find you. Make sure this coincides with the keywords you are marketting your site for. If you are getting more hits from keywords and phrases you hadn't thought of, you probably need to rethink your market and your search engine strategy. The list of most popular browsers is largely useless, although it may stress the point of browser independence if you receive a lot of visitors using obscure browsers.

Analog

Analog is even less useful although it claims to be the most popular web log stats analyser. It does give even more granularity to the total number of visitors and hits by allowing you to view the figures by hour, day or month. Marvelous..... Analog also tries to determine the most common search terms that visitors used to find you, which is slightly useful. Just like Webalizer, it tells you what operating systems and browsers your visitors used. And a few other bits of largely useless information

Clicktracks

Analog and Webalizer are two, very average, web based website statistics programs that can produce some slightly useful information about your site from your web server logs. In reality, neither of them are doing anything particularly clever. They are just taking your logs and counting the entries. You could do that yourself with a spreadsheet. Clicktracks*, however, goes one huge step further. Clicktracks* is a program that you install on your computer, not your webserver, and tell it where your web server log file is. This can be the log file on your server itself and it will FTP it onto your machine, or it can be the log file that you have already downloaded. It will then conduct some rather sophisticated analysis of your logs and actually track each individual visitor to work out what they were doing on your site. It then shows your actual web pages with the percentage of people who clicked on each link marked against each individual link.

This is only the start and is already leagues ahead of the competition. It is fantastic for determining which links generate the most sales and giving a general idea of what your visitors are using your website for. If you have two links on a page pointing to the same place, you can find out exactly which one generates the most clicks and then copy whatever was different about that link to other areas of the side, to effectively lead your visitors exactly where you want them to go. Knowing which links do not generate many links can help to determine whether you are wasting effort concentrating on those areas. If a lot of visitors click the Help link or the contact us link on a particular page, chances are, that page is confusing for your visitors, or isn't giving them what they think they should be getting. By focussing on improving that page, can save a lot of lost customers and a lot of wasted time answering the same questions.

Along with each page is also a run down of where your visitors came from to arrive at this page. So, you can find out exactly which of your pages is sending the most visitors to your online shop, for example, allowing you to improve those generating fewer sales. Clicktracks* also shows you how many people left your site completely at this page. Naturally you'll want people to leave your site once they have made an order or performed some other action. If they are leaving before they get to this point, you need to work on certain areas to make sure people continue through to your destination page.

And now for the best part about Clicktracks*. You can tag your visitors. This means that you can differentiate between visitors who arrived at your site using different search terms or came from a different search engine or different website altogether. Then, it will show you the ratios for these different groups of visitors. It will show you how many people who arrived at your site after searching for "MyWidget" clicked on each link compared to those who searched for anything else. This is amazing! You can actually identify exactly which are your most profitable search engine keywords. By comparing the search terms you can find out which ones generated the most sales. Of you can find out which search engine or website is sending you the visitors most likely to buy from you.

You can also tag the visitors based on where they went instead of just by where they came from. You can segregate you visitors by those that bought from you (ie. those that reached your payment complete page) and those that didn't. So, you can work out the general habits of those who buy from you compared to those who don't. You can find out how many people bought your products that arrived at the homepage compared to those who arrived at another page. You can tag them by what type of browser they are using, by how long they spent on your site, and all kinds of other criteria.

Including by date! This is another great feature. You can implement a change to your site and then compares your visitor stats from before the change and after the change to see if your change had the desired effect. This tool is vital for constant iterative improvement to your site. Make a change, see if it worked, make another, etc. You simply keep the positive changes and drop the ones that diddn't work and your site will constantly get better. The power is endless.

Click here for a video demo of clicktracks.
Turn your speakers up.

Analysing your website statistics is vital to improving your website's performance. It's no good just putting stuff on your website and hoping people will see it and use it. You need to work out what people do when they visit your site so that you can target it better to your visitors. I would encourage you to try the Clicktracks* free trial, the software is quite expensive but the free trial version itself can show you a phenomenal amount of information about your website so that you can make some serious improvements. I also encourage you to join their free newsletter (just join the "Evaluation tips & reminders" section). This is full of really useful ideas and invaluable analysis tips that I couldn't be without.

It's not very often that a piece of software really strikes me as a work of genius but the thought that goes into this product is something to be admired. It's a pity more software companies don't follow their lead in innovation and intelligence.

If you learn nothing else from this website, learn this: Analyse Your Stats, Analyse Your Stats, Analyse Your Stats.

Web Log Stats Analysers

Webalizer

Analog

Clicktracks

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