There are a number of areas where the data housed in your logfiles can help you understand and cater to your users:
Traffic
What's your traffic like to any given page? Are there certain pages that stand out
as high-traffic areas? Pages that corral more viewers are hot in terms of
real estate — ad space on those high-traffic pages
should cost more, right? And what is the overall
volume like on your site? Do you see traffic jump when you publish exciting,
new content, or does it stay relatively flat throughout your publishing
schedule? Do you get twice as much traffic on Fridays than Mondays? Thorough
traffic reporting will present the answers to these questions if you take
the time to seek them out.
Audience
Who's visiting your site? Are most of your users from the Unites States or Japan?
You can look at the domain names or even IP addresses of your visitors and
determine where they are geographically. You can also find out where your
visitors are coming from demographically. Are you being visited by AOL
users, university students, or workers at defense contracting firms? A site
in Cancun, Mexico that sees heavy traffic from American university
students should be certain that its English translation service is doing
its job — the site is also especially ripe for ads pushing college spring
break travel packages.
Browsers/Platforms
Are your users primarily Macintosh users? Linux users? Since your site
probably varies in presentation between OS X and GNU, you can use the
reports about platform specifics to round out your site testing and quality
assurance practices. And as any savvy developer knows, the differences
between how a page looks in IE 5.5 and Netscape 6 or Konqueror can be
astounding. Are you using gobs of IE-specific CSS positioning on pages that are
primarily being viewed by BeOS users? For your sake and theirs, I hope not.
Browser plug-ins are fun only when they work, so if you have any content
that's "plug-in required," you should be sure that the majority of your
users are running a platform for which the needed plugins are available.
Errors
What kinds of errors are your log files reporting? Are any links on your
site handing out those pesky 404s? Better check those links, then. Are
your redirects working or are they pointing your users out into the ether?
Are any of your scripts loading incorrectly? Even if everything runs ship-shape on your workstation, a report that shows faulty scripts might lead
you to test them on different browsers or from behind a firewall. Are users
ditching an image before it fully loads up? There's a cause for concern —
look into it. The image may have an error, or may simply need to be optimized.
Referers
A referer indicates where a user was refered
from, whether it be an advertisement, a link somewhere else on your site, or
a link on some one else's site. You can use your referer data to see what
kind of traffic you're getting out of a plug on a message board, an ad, or
even a mention on Slashdot.
Getting at the Info
So, how do you get your paws on all this valuable data? If you're hip to Unix, you can use grep and sort commands to extract data from raw log files. Or just FTP down a logfile and open it up in your favorite text editor.
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