Web site traffic

Cross town traffic
Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.

If you’ve just spent some time or money on Search Engine optimisation or have been thinking of doing so, you might also be interested in understanding more about the quantity and type of traffic visiting your site. By the same token, if you’ve just spent or are considering spending some money on a website marketing campaign, you might find it useful to be able to measure how effective your campaign has been. One way to do this is by reading your server logs.

Logs:
Web servers keep log files – and, although there is more than one format and they are not always stored in the same place, with a little perseverance you can find and interpret them.

Tools:
In their raw form logs can be almost unintelligible – but there are a number of tools out there that will process these logs and present you with a visual and usually meaningful representation of the information they contain.

We looked at Sawmill (http://www.sawmill.net)

Key information stored in server log files:

• Hits per page (browser requests for a page or part of a page)
• Referrers (page or domain a visitor came from)
• Geographical locations of visitors

These three types of information alone, can used to interpret things like

• Which parts of your website are popular during any given time period
• What directories or search engines generate the most links to your site
• How many unique users your website has attracted during any given time period

This information could be extremely useful to you, especially during or after a marketing campaign. Other types of information available include:

• Browsers that visitors used to view your website
• Screen resolution of visitors monitors
• Operating systems on visitor computers
• Search terms used by visitors to find you on Search Engines

Joe Aliferis is a Director of Newforms.co.uk Ltd. A web technology development consultancy based in Brighton.