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Web Analytics - Part 2 Jason OConnor Copywrite 2004
Not accessing and reviewing your vital website statistics is like never looking at your checking account activity and never knowing how much money you have in it.
In Part 1 of this two-part series I explained how to crunch relevant website statistical data to facilitate constant e-marketing initiative improvements. I explained what types of data are important, such as unique visits, click-thru numbers and percentages, lead conversion rates, and how to process all these numbers. (You can read Part 1 at http://www.oakwebworks.com/articles/article-6-analytics-part-1.htm). Here in Part 2 I’ll explain how you obtain data in first place and then provide a fool-proof method for website click-thru statistical acquisition.
The first thing you need to know is where your website lives. Every website sits on a server, a computer with purpose of waiting for requests from clients (people’s personal computers by way of a browser). Each server physically lives in one of two places. It is either located at its website owner’s company, which is called in-house, internal, or self hosting. If company A has an active website and owns server website is on, and server is physically located at their company, then it falls in this first category.
The other place a website server can physically live is at an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or host company. There are a number of configurations server can fall under in this category which is beyond scope of this article. The main thing to keep in mind is you first need to know where your website’s server is.
Once you know this, you can begin to assemble all relevant site statistics. All servers automatically generate all data you’ll ever need on an ongoing basis. They are relentless in their stats recording. They record all data in what’s called server log files. Manually parsing through these log files is a horrible job that should only be wished on your worst enemy. They are huge laundry lists of everything from every site visitor’s IP address, browser type, site referral, time and date visited, and much more.
Fortunately, there are software programs that can do this for you. One of most popular is WebTrends (http://www.netiq.com/webtrends/default.asp). You feed your server log files to WebTrends software, and it produces for you an excellent presentation of all your relevant (and some superfluous) website statistics.
If your website sits on a server that your company has in-house, than you need to purchase WebTrends or some similar software and locate your server log files. The files often end in .log. In other words, it’s up to you to get your website’s statistics, and you do this by locating your server log files and running them through software such as WebTrends.
