Importance of Your Log Files

December 12, 2006

Web servers almost always output daily log files which are a running record of that day’s traffic activity on the website. Many smaller, shared hosting plans provide a simple, web-based way to view the stats and therefore track activity. They may also provide an interface for controlling a report generator, thereby allowing you to automatically generate HTML reports of your stats somewhere on your server so that you can view the report in your web browser.

This data is very important and, when considering a web host, don’t even pay attention if they do not have an adequate means to get this data. With it, you can find out all kinds of data including your visitor count, unique visitors, page views, hits, referrers, search keywords, server errors, etc. You can even find out information about the visitors of your site: what browser they were using, their operating system, their IP address, etc. And, if your analysis platform is properly equipped, you can use the IP address to find out the user’s geographic location and thus build reports on which areas of the world, or even which cities, most of your traffic is coming from.

Now, for a person familiar with marketing even at the simplest level, the value of this information is apparent. But, for anyone else, let me discuss this for a moment. The traffic levels alone are important for measuring the success of the website. All webmasters should keep a running log and graph of traffic to the website, allowing you to track traffic levels over time. With this data, one can keep track of how changes to the website affect traffic. Is a new article bringing in traffic? Is a new focus of your site interesting to users? The trend of the traffic will tell you.

Most sites are engaged in marketing in one form or the other, whether it be simply asking for link exchanges or engaging in paid advertising. Is the promotion working? Look at the traffic data. Want to do some keyword advertising on Google? Well, which keywords are your users using most to find your website? That’s what they’re interested in. And likewise, if the keywords are generally pointing to a specific area of interest, then you might want to consider developing more content towards that topic and give your users what they want.

One is able to get more data from the log files then they will likely need. There are some key stats which you should regularly keep track of:

Page Views. This is the number of times a user visited an actual page on your site. This is very important as it tracks overall activity on the site. This is distinct from hits, which would be the number of files that are hit on the site, images and all. Hits is a pretty meaningless statistics. Concentrate on page views.
Uniques. This is the number of unique visitors that came to your site. In other words, the number of actual people. It does not count one person more than once if they come back more than once in the same day or other period.
Repeat Visitors. This is the number of people who came back to your site again. I usually ratio this number against the visitor count in order to get a percentage. This percentage, then, can measure the stickiness of your site. A very low number means your site isn’t very interesting. A good number means you’re giving them a reason to come back.
Keywords and Referrers. This is not a stat that is so much numerical, but it is data which you should analyze in order to find out what people want on your site and where they are coming from. Knowing where they come from is useful for fostering relationships with other sites. It can also let you know if your link exchange strategy is working.

The only way to manage a site which is going to succeed is by statistics. If the site is a hobby site, then great. But, if you’re looking to drive traffic and possibly dollars, you need to manage by statistics. This means keeping close tabs on your site statistics, analyzing them regularly, comparing to known influences, and thus deriving conclusions as to what people want, what people respond to, and thus what you should do with your website.

Marketing