Determine Who Your Visitors Are, Where They Come From, and Why They Came to Your Site

This knowledge can help you tune your site design, and allow you to quickly focus your attention on more successful promotional strategies.  Marketers have long complained about the fact that getting precise data is not easy on the Internet. Practically speaking, you can't know the name of the person who viewed your web site unless they tell you. But your visitors do leave much information behind, and the right software can help you learn a lot about those who browse your pages…

The Server that Hosts Your Site Tracks Visitor Information Log Files

Every request that a server receives from the Internet is recorded, along with what action it took to fulfill that request. These files can be analyzed by special software and detailed reports generated, with specific information about every time your site was visited.

At last count, I read of more than 60 server log analysis software packages on the market. Some cost tens of thousands of dollars, and most need to be installed on the root server itself, not a job for the average computer user.

What Kind of Data Can You Expect From a Good Server Log Stat Package?

• Number of page impressions. This is much more important than the number of "hits". Hits are a measure of how many html elements were requested by the browser, so a single visitor looking at a single page can register as a dozen or more hits.

• The average time visitors spend on your site. Analysis of server log files have shown that 50% of the visitors to a clients home page left after 30 seconds. The site had been designed to look cool, and had may large graphic elements. But people were not willing to wait for more than a minute for it to load. The site owners would never have known that with just a "hit counter"

• Number of unique visitors. Do you have one person visiting 100 times, or 100 people coming 1 time?
  What pages are the most popular, and when. This will show you what your site does right.

• What pages are least popular. Do they need updating? Is it a navigational problem? Make changes and watch the results.

• Which pages do people enter and exit your site from. Most sites are designed with a home page that is considered a "front door", but people tend to bookmark what interests them. How can your site design benefit from those traffic patterns?

• Where your visitors are coming from. The referrer log can tell you which sites sent visitors to you, even what keywords were used to find your site on a search engine. This information is critical to judge how successful any specific promotion is.

• How people navigate through your site. Great information for improving your sites "ease of use".
   

Use the Tools Provided by Your Hosting Company

All of the Web Hosting Providers I've discussed here allow you access to your site statistics.  They all also provide you a web interface to analyze the log files rather than examining the raw log files.  If your site has any traffic at all, it is not practical to examine the raw log files.  You will definitely want to use a tool..