Introduction

It is important to understand your web site. You need to be aware of where your site's traffic is coming from and what your visitors are doing.

Log File Analysis

Behind every web site you visit is a web server, whose purpose in life is to respond to you by locating and sending the requested files to your computer. After each request, the web server logs the results of the exchange in a "log file". A typical log file contains information about which computer made the request, for which file, and on which date. Additional information is sometimes recorded as well including the browser type, the IP address, error codes, the referring site, and the destination site.

Log file analysis simply takes this information and tries to make sense of it so that intelligent conclusions can be drawn. Simple things like how many total files were requested can be easily calculated and reported. By looking for multiple requests from the same computer during the same timeframe, more complex things can be calculated, like the number of total visitors and visits that were made to a site. By adding other information, like advertising information, ad impressions and click through rates can also be calculated.

Log file analysis alone cannot give you the complete picture. There is often data that is not captured in the log file, for instance on an eCommerce web site the products being purchased during a given transaction. That's why we use SurfTracking Reporting

SurfTracking Reporting

SurfTracking Reporting produces a detailed report, analysing your web site traffic. This information is vital for evaluating the effectiveness of marketing and Pay Per Click activity.

SurfTracking closely integrates with your web site and is able to track not only page visits but traffic source as well as record data that is unavailable to simple log file analysis.

You don't want to spend 50% of budget on 10% of traffic, so accurate reporting is important.