How to Measure the Success of your Internet Business
Traditional businesses have a very hard time knowing where did their visitors came from , but on the Internet these can be measured and that make it possible for the owner to try many strategies and see which are bringing the best results in order to improve his business.
Although the capability to measure your web site audience is available without any special development since every access to a web site is recorded in the server logs, it’s true that there are some points to consider to get more accurate metrics.
Web Server Log Analysis
Every time a visitor loads a web page, some information is written in a file that tracks all activity. Here is an example of this file:
- 217.25.131.67 – [24/Nov/2002:08:45:35] “GET /host.htm HTTP/1.1″ 200 13713 “-” “Mozilla”
- 217.25.131.67 – [24/Nov/2002:08:45:37] “GET /host.htm HTTP/1.1″ 200 13713 “-” “Mozilla”
- 64.156.198.74 – [24/Nov/2002:09:21:21] “GET /index.htm HTTP/1.1″ 404 287 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (X11)”
- 64.156.198.85 – [24/Nov/2002:16:01:25] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 10702 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (X11)”
- 200.82.41.144 – [24/Nov/2002:16:29:23] “GET /host HTTP/1.1″ 301 319 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible)”
- 200.82.41.144 – [24/Nov/2002:16:29:23] “GET /host/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 338 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible)”
The first 4 numbers separated by dots is the IP address. Every computer connected to the Internet has a unique IP number, which helps to identify that visitor. The problem of IP addresses is that they are not always fixed, since in some computers they change every time the computer connects to the Internet, which doesn’t make it an exact form of metric. For example, watching the log you could end up thinking that you got many different visitors when in reality there is only one visitor that got to your site with a different IP address every time.Next, we have the date and hour of the access, next the word GET, the page or image requested followed by the page from which the visitor got, followed by the browser version. The page from which the visitor got is key because if your site is new, most of the people will be getting to your site from other places. For example: when www.BeTheFinest.com had little time online I decided to participate in a forum and few days later, some people got through the link that still is there, increasing a little bit my link popularity in the search engines, but this is a topic for another article.
Each line in the log is an element of your page that could be an image for example, the page requested or other element of your web. For example: if you have a page with 4 images, there will be 5 lines in the log file, each of this lines are called a “hit”.
It isn’t required that you read this file directly to know when you have been visited and from where, because there is software that help you browse through the information gathered in the log such as the free ones (included in most hosting packages): Analog, Webalizer, Awstats and more sophisticated software such as Web Trends and other tools much more expensive only at the reach of very big corporations with deep pockets like Netmetric’s XOS whose license starts at $49,000 yearly.
Getting more accurate metrics with cookies.
A cookie is a little piece of information that can be placed by the page developer to have a very detailed tracking of the activity of visitors. We use them to show a Pop-Up window asking to subscribe to our newsletter. Even if cookies are an excellent tool to track visitor activity they are not perfect because those could be deactivated or your client could be inside a company that have a Proxy Server in place (as a security measure) set up to disallow cookies.
Exact Tracking is Possible
An exact form of tracking is possible requesting a login and password. Once done it, you can be sure about the identity of your visitor (if his password hasn’t been compromised). This system isn’t used much because it requires that the provider have a strong case to ask for identification or else this could be a pain to the visitor.
Take a look at Yahoo. Not always you have to identify yourself, but if you do it, for example at Yahoo Groups, you could use other email address to receive your emails from the forums, with which Yahoo got the perfect excuse to benefit with exact tracking of his visitors.
Anyway, whether you stay with the basic statistics provided by your web hosting company or you decide to use more accurate methods, these statistics will be very important once your site increase his audience and sales.
