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The best way to know whether your Website is or isn’t achieving its goals is to collect extensive traffic data, not just how many hits you're getting, but which pages are the most popular, who's visiting your site, when do they visit, and other data that can give you a clear idea of what's going on.
The power of the Web is astounding. As an extension of other sources, or perhaps as the only source, the informational, operational, and marketing aspects of the Web are potent. Having a Web presence is essential, but may not be sufficient. Recognizing that Website behavior has a direct effect on business success and customer loyalty, companies are now required to better understand their customers so their sites are responsive, easy to navigate, and present what the customers are interested in purchasing. However, many businesses have little or no idea what customers and potential customers are doing on their Websites. Websites that are slow to respond and contain hard-to-find items will drive customers away. To justify Website changes, though, using the right information is essential in optimizing a Website, which means there is a growing need for tools that analyze Website effectiveness; that form of analysis is known as Web analytics.
Consider this scenario: If a Website is promoting a sale through advertisement that is valid for only one day, the Website owner might want to know if the campaign was successful. One indicator would be whether the campaign generated additional Website traffic. Web analytics is the monitoring and reporting of Website traffic so that you have a better understanding of the interaction between your Web visitor’s actions and what the Website is offering, as well as leveraging that knowledge to optimize the Website for increased customer loyalty and business benefits. Web analytics can assist with the following tasks:
- planning Web capacity to handle future growth;
- understanding the habits of new and repeat visitors;
- targeting offers and campaigns to categories of visitors;
- determining appropriate online advertising campaigns versus other channels;
- identifying which business partners to work with based on referral traffic
- altering Web pages that get little traffic;
- and much more.
Methods of data collection within a Web environment
The capability, comprehensiveness, and timeliness of a Web metrics solution depend on the methods you use for capturing Website usage data. There are several methods, all of which are viable options to use, either alone or in combination. We will discuss their benefits and drawbacks. A prioritized list of Web metrics requirements should be agreed on and used to help decide which method or combination of methods best answers the Website metrics questions with sufficient details and accuracy in the appropriate time frame.
To help set some context, there are three main locations where Web data can be captured within the Web environment:
- The backend servers that deliver the Websites content, including the HTTP servers, application servers, commerce servers, and so on.
- The Internet Service Provider (ISP) handling the data flow between the Web servers and a user's browser.
- The client browser that displays the Web pages.
The options we will look at here are: HTTP server log analysis, server and network monitors, and single-pixel analysis.
HTTP server log analysis
This form of Web traffic measurement, or Web analytics, involves the analysis of log files produced by the HTTP servers in your Web server environment. Each HTTP server vendor (such as Apache, Microsoft Internet Server, Netscape, Domino GO, and so on) provides logging capabilities with their products. These logging capabilities typically include configuration options that enable and disable logging as well as specify the type of data logged and the quantity of data logged. Data is logged to files in one or more file formats. As Web server software has evolved, so has the variety of logging options and logging implementations. Over this period the log file formats that servers log to has settled on a small set of formats, such as:
- NCSA Combined Log Format
- NCSA Separate Log Format (3-log format)
- NCSA Common Log Format (access log)
- W3C Extended Log Format
Server and network monitors
A server monitor typically runs as a plug-in to the Web server, getting information about each event through an application programming interface (API). Server APIs are proprietary, so the events and data seen by server monitors depend on the Web server release. Usually, a server monitor can get unique visitor IDs, referrer pages, and more. Some data isn't available to server monitors. For example, when a visitor interrupts the transmission of a page by hitting the stop button, typing in a new URL, or clicking on a Web shortcut, this has the effect of a "stop request" being sent to the Web server. The Web server then interrupts the transmission of the page being sent. Interrupted transmissions are very informative, as they may indicate that a particular resource is taking too long to generate, or that the whole Web server is overloaded. Unfortunately, Web servers typically don't notify plugins or record when transmissions end prematurely. Installing a server monitor does introduce some risk to the Web server, because a problem with the monitor could crash the Web server. Also, a server monitor that directly calls a database server introduces even higher risk. If it is a production Website and requires a server monitor, the monitoring and recording processes should be separated, and/or the server monitor should be isolated in a separate process.
Network monitors perform "packet sniffing" through an application that registers a function with the operating system (OS) called to view each packet as it crosses the wire. A network monitor should be installed on each Web server; however, with traditional Ethernet LANs a single network monitor could report on every HTTP event on the subnet. Network interfaces give you the choice to either sniff packets from a single machine or sniff all packets on the wire. When network monitors sniff all packets, they consume much more processor time, making it nearly impossible to implement on high-traffic sites. In this case, the only practical solution is to install a network monitor on each Web server machine. A network monitor can see everything, including client requests, server responses, cookies, and HTML files; it can also track stop requests issued from the browser, making it possible to list the pages that are taking too long to generate. It can measure the Web server's response time to different requests. Some network monitors can report on content-related HTML tags and capture "form data" transmitted via a POST request when the visitor hits a submit button.
A network monitor significantly reduces risks to Web server operation by placing data on its own machine to isolate the traffic analyzer from the Web server. If the network monitor crashes, the Web server is unaffected. The risk is minimal, even when running on the same machine, since the network monitor is a separate process operating independently from Web-server processes. One significant drawback to network monitors, however, is that they can't track encrypted information from secure Web servers.
Single-pixel analysis
One of the newer methods for Website data collection, referred to as single-pixel technology, enables on-the-fly data collection of page view information. This method provides an alternative to batch log data collection, lending itself to high traffic Websites where continuous collection of page view information helps keep up with the data volumes. It usually provides more timely access to usage and visitor data than batch processing of logs. For these reasons, it is a popular choice among Web analytics service providers.
The single-pixel terminology originates from the transmission of data during the request for a one-pixel image placed somewhere on a Web page. Single-pixel technology is instrumented by adding HTML and JavaScript code to the enabled Web pages via manual modification or specialized tooling. Some or all of the pages on a Website can be instrumented for single-pixel data collection specific to any or all of the individual pages on the site.
The data collected includes basic information similar to that logged by an HTTP server, as well as client-side behavior, and can even be further customized. The information is collected when the enabled page is loaded in a browser, and then sent back to the analysis server for analyzing and reporting processes. Single-pixel tracking has negligible effect on a visitor's Web page usage. The tag itself is not visible to the user and does not modify the look or layout of the tagged page in any way. Keeping the associated JavaScript code very small, usually around 500 bytes, further minimizes the impact on page download speed, and ideally the data is POSTed to the server with no content returned to the client browser. Note also that the tag gathers statistics only on the page containing the embedded tag. When the browser leaves a tagged page, the JavaScript halts.
Single-pixel information collects information by page views, rather than by "hits," as recorded in HTTP server logs. This detailed page view information is available once the page is fully loaded, the JavaScript is enabled, and it's determined which of the objects loaded in the Web page are page views within the Website (and not references to other Websites). The benefits that single-pixel technology brings are powerful, and an analysis solution isn't required to "stitch together" multiple Web logs, which may need to be collected from around the world.
The JavaScript collects a number of statistics relevant to the tagged page, including:
- time it takes the page to load;
- whether or not the page loads with errors;
- whether or not the page load is aborted by the user;
- referring page of the loaded page (if there was one);
- link destination clicked to leave page (if there was one);
- usage information about any forms on the page;
- session state (for example, prior visits, duration, number of page views, and so on);
- traversal path;
- and more.
The locations of the tags and the number of tags embedded on your site depends entirely on the extent to which you opt to customize.
If JavaScript is disabled or not supported by the browser, single-pixel methods can still be supported, but require different capture processing involving an HTML IMG component (to request the single-pixel image), HTTP GETs (instead of POSTs), and use of servlet redirection (to prevent loss of single-pixel data due to caching).
Web Analytics & 123webconnect.com
123webconnect.com analytics are powerful and a featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically, and it is FREE! This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information you'll need. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers.Contact us today and see how we can help you with your companies Website.