Hey, you! What are you doing? Where are you going? More importantly, what are you clicking on?
Ah, if only it were that easy. But no, most users like to travel the Web incognito. They come to your site, poke around a few files, download a PDF or two, and then -- poof -- disappear, leaving nothing but questions in their wake: Where did they come from? Which browsers are they
using? Are they experiencing any errors?
Short of asking outright, there are ways to find the answers to these questions. The most celebrated method of tracking users is by planting cookies, which some folks
consider rude or invasive, and, oh yeah, you need to know how
to program them. Not to
worry -- there is an option that requires very little technical
know-how, comes at no (or nominal) cost, and may already be a part of
your site's backend. I'm talking about logs! No, not those fancy browser-based publishing automation
systems with a cult-like
following. I speak of log files.
Almost every Web server
worth its salt has some sort of system that stores information about
which pages, images, and files are requested, who requests them, and how many bytes are
transferred. All of this information is dumped into a log file that is
stored in a specific location on your server.
These log files are yours to explore. You can simply open the log file in an
ordinary text editor and read the raw data. Or, for a more user-friendly view of the info, suck the log file into a nifty stand-alone software package or browser-based viewer, which parse the data and spit it out as a charts or graphs or tables that clearly illustrate your users' activities.
Not sure why this information is valuable? Well, if you've invested time and money in a website, one of your biggest points of interest is indubitably traffic -- whether people are exposed to advertisements or your products, traffic is directly proportional to
revenue. But there's more to
traffic than just eyes on pages. Sure, the numbers you get from your
log files will tell you how many people visited your site in any given space
of time, but traffic data can also be
studied to give you a clear, precise idea of what kinds of viewing practices
your users exhibit.
Let's say a user comes to your site and views a few pages. In
server-speak, user actions are counted in requests. Any time the user is served
an image, an HTML file, or an ad, it counts as a request. If
17 HTTP requests are served in one
session, how many of those 17 requests are images? How many are ads? How
many turned up as (eek!) 404 "address failed" errors? These are the types of questions that
can be answered by picking over your log files and generating in-depth
reports.
The trick is to learn as much as possible about what is being served to your users. Vitals like location, browser version, and time spent on your
site allow you to tailor your content and presentation design specifically to
please the users that you're doing business with.
So what, exactly, do you look for? Let's take a closer look.
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