Getting traffic to your web site without examining it, is like being blindfolded in a crowd. You hear voices, but you don’t know which direction they are coming from or who they are. Without examining your web site traffic, it is difficult to improve your web site marketing.

 
Know Your Traffic Language

You should be aware of the different terms used to describe web site traffic, so as not to be confused about your web site visitors. Here are the main terms used:

Visit – These are all requests made by a specific user to the site during a set period of time. The visit is ended if a set period of time (say 30 minutes) goes by with no further

accesses. Users are identified by cookies, username or hostnames/IP addresses

Hit – This is a request to the server for a file not a page. Your page can be made up of different files, such as graphic, files, audio files or css and javascript files, resulting in a

number of hits for that page. Each of these requests is called a hit.

Pageview/Impression – This is the number of times a page is accessed as a whole.

Unique View - A page view by a unique person within a 24 hour period.

Referrer - A page that links to your site. By looking at your referrers will tell you who's linked to your site. This can be particularly valuable for seeing where your search engine traffic is coming from.

 User Agent - You can identify what software is being used to access your site, you'll be able to tell if users are abusing it, and when the search engines last crawled your pages.

1. Counters – These are heavily used on web sites. It is very common to go to a page and see something like "You are visitor number 12345 to this page". These numbers cannot be trusted as the page designer has the ability to seed the base number or to alter the counter such that it adds more than 1 each time.

 2. Trackers – Tracking software details the path a visitor takes through your Website, so they do more than just count your traffic: they track it. Tracking software tells you more than just the number of visitors -- it can break visitor statistics down by date, time, browser, page viewed, referrer, and countless other values.

 Analyzing log data can give you a good idea of where your site visitors are coming from, which pages they are visiting, how long they stay, and which browsers they are using. Before signing on with a hosting company, make sure they offer access to raw log files. Even if you don't need them immediately, sooner or later you'll be glad to have them.

There are also different types of log files - access, referrer, error, and agent are the primary ones.

Here is a sample of a raw access log file entry:

Access log:-

Analyzing the access log will give you information about who visited your site, which pages they visited, and how long they stayed on the site. This is useful information in

determining whether or not your site is working as you be determined.

Referrer Log:-

The referrer log contains referral information - the source that referred the visitor to your site. If the referrer was a search engine, you will also find the keywords that were entered to find your site - very useful information. Here are some example records. The record

below shows that the visitor followed a link from somedomain.com to the index page of the site.

Agent Log:-

This log provides information on which browser and operating system was used to access your site.

Error Log:-

The error log obviously provides a record of errors generated by the server and sent back to the client. The record below shows the type of server, date and time of the error, client identification, explanation of the error code generated by the server, and the path to the file that caused the error.

As you can see, log files contain a wealth of information about how your visitors are using your site.