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An Introduction to Website Analysis
and Reporting
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| Your website is much more than just an online brochure.
It is much more than just a shop. Your website expands your ability
to promote your business and sell your products to a worldwide audience.
Previously when you sent out brochures you knew to whom you had sent
them. If you advertised you knew who was likely to see the advert.
You were in control of your image and to whom you promoted your business.
If someone bought from you, you could watch them in your shop and
see where they stopped and looked, what they picked up and what they
bought. You could even discuss their choice with them. You laid out
your shop on the basis of this experience and you selected your product
lines on the basis of what your customers said they liked. |
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| A website is similar to a traditional shop. It has
shop windows (the home page and other promotional pages) that entice
visitors to enter. It has departments with signs to tell you where
to find things (the menus) and it has a till where you can buy your
goods (the checkout). However it differs in one fundamental way. Personal
interaction with your customers and prospective customers is not possible.
To replace this personal contact and the information this can provide,
a website manager must gather other information. Luckily it is possible
to gather a huge amount of information on where your website visitors
come from, what they do whilst on your site and which ones buy from
you. Although this will never fully replace personal contact, it can
go a long way to doing so. |
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| The information is collected and stored in log files.
Programmes such as ClickAbacus then allow you to analyse these files
and produce reports on visitor activity. Reports show the date and
time of day that visitors accessed your site, where they came from,
which pages they accessed and what they did. You can see what browser
type they were using, their screen resolution and the country and
city in which they connected to the Internet. If they came from an
online advert, you can track their activity to see what proportion
buy products or services from you and hence analyse the effectiveness
of your online advertising campaigns. |
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There are two fundamental ways of gathering website
visitor intelligence: |
- Server log files
- Page Tag log files
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| Server log files can be created by the web server as
website visitors connect to it. A process runs on the web server that
monitors visitor activity and writes details to a log file. In contrast,
Page Tag log files are created by an application that is initiated
by a piece of code embedded in the web page. Page Tag code is run
by the client browser and writes activity logs to a remote web server.
ClickAbacus is a Page Tag based solution. |
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Server Logging |
| Server logging has inherent features that suit some
situations and cause problems in others. These features and their
effects can be summarised as follows: |
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| Server Resources: Server logging uses
server resources, which can cause problems if the web server is heavily
loaded. |
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| Cached Pages: It is quite normal for
web pages to be cached on the Internet. The effect of this is that
the page is not sourced from the web server but is instead provided
to the browser by the cache server. The web server never sees the
request and cannot log the activity. |
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| Information Collected: The information
collected by the server log is limited by the server system, is generally
fairly basic and cannot be easily enhanced. |
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| Multiple Servers: If your website
is load balanced across multiple servers a log file will be created
by each server. To create a consolidated view they will need to be
merged prior to analysis. |
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| Information Collection: The collection
of information is very easy to turn on and off. |
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| Log Appliance: A log appliance can
be placed in front of the web server farm to log visitor activity.
This relieves the servers of the workload associated with logging
and enables a single log file to be created however many web servers
there are. |
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Page Tagging |
| Page tagging also has certain inherent features. These
features and their effects can be summarised as follows: |
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| Browser based logging: The browser
runs the page tag code so every visitor that loads the page is logged. |
| JavaScript: Most tag code is JavaScript
based, so may not be run by all browsers. Some, like the ClickAbacus
page tag also source an image to ensure that all activity is logged. |
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| Information Collected: The use of
a small programme to create the log allows almost anything you want
to be collected – for example campaign IDs from online advertising
campaigns can be recorded. |
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| Information Collection: The collection
of data is dependant upon the page tag being present. It must be copied
onto every page and each new page that is added to the site must also
include it. Any pages without a tag will be invisible to the logging
system. |
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| Log Server Location: The server that
collects and stores the log file can be located anywhere on the Internet. |
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| In general, if all you want to know is approximately
how many visitors you had to your website over a given period and
the pages they visited, then server log files will suffice. If you
want in depth analysis of the effectiveness of your online activities
then you will need to consider a page tag based solution. |
