Custom Website Traffic Analysis Uncovers Crucial Info for Your Site

If you own a website, you need to know whether it's attracting visitors and doing what it was designed to do. You thus need to know its web analytics. Two great resources to get you started are Analog and Google Analytics. The former is a free web log analyzer and the latter is a free website traffic analysis service. Google Analytics or similar services is your only option if you do not have access to your own web server log file.

A web log analysis tool, or a web traffic analyzer, is a web analytics software that parses a web server log file to obtain summary values that show who, when, and how a website is visited. A report is usually generated to present the information in a structured manner. The metrics obtained include the number of visits, number of unique visitors, visit durations, page views, most viewed pages, entry and exit pages, search phrases leading visitors to your site, and so on.

Whether you use web analytics services or not, it is important to do your own website traffic analysis. So try to obtain your server log file. Your best option is to sign up for Google Analytics to cover the basics, then use Mergemill Pro to dig deep and obtain the metrics crucial to your success.

Before getting to the important metrics, however, you need to solve one problem. Web server log files record both human and bots visits. You need to enter something like "YodaoBot|bingbot|Googlebot|Baiduspider|Sosospider|PadPollbot|MJ12bot|YoudaoBot|YandexBot|Exabot" into the RegEx Exclude filter for the appropriate field to filter out visits from search engine spiders and website uptime monitoring services, so that your site metrics are not skewed. There may also be other traffic sources you want to filter out, like those from your company, if they become significant enough to distort your final picture.

With the above problem out of the way, you may proceed to obtain the important information you need:

1. Focus on qualified visitors. They surf around your site for more than a few seconds. The visit duration is defined by the visit times of the entry and exit pages.
2. Identify search term quality or effectiveness. Effective search terms are those that bring higher percentages of qualified visitors.
3. Track visitor movement through the sales funnel. Since visitors rarely surf around your site in a linear manner, it is best to define your sales funnel in terms of page groups: landing pages, persuasive pages, and action pages. Try to obtain metrics to show how effective each group is in moving visitors to the next stage.
4. Focus on changes and trends in addition to the absolute numbers. It is more likely that you fix what is not working. But most web analytics software and services rank items in your metrics report by their absolute numbers, and those early trends and changes are simply cut off from the lists. This is one reason why you need to do your own website traffic analysis.
5. If you have the resources and time, you may want to track customer lifecycle analytics. This is a visitor-centric approach to measure page views and other events tied to individual visitors. This effort attempts to connect all the data points into a marketing funnel that can offer insights into visitor behavior and website optimization.

This is just the beginning of what you may do. Obviously it requires a fair bit of work and some experience with Mergemill Pro to effectively analyze a web server log. Developers may consider expanding their skill set and offer this as another service to their customers. The application of such experience and skill may be applied to analyzing other log files as well.

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