In addition to the standard site statistics, which includes the number of unique visitors, open pages and a lot of other useful information, the webmaster should know many other things about such a site, and this is what the logs reveal to him. At the same time, beginning webmasters quite often do not even know what a log is and what it gives.
What information is still needed?
As mentioned above, in addition to the standard parameters, the site owner must know a lot of other data:
- Which pages are the most visited.
- For what search queries users often get to the site.
- Which browsers or operating systems are the most popular among visitors.
- What screen resolution do visitors use most often?
- And much more.
How to find out?
In the overwhelming majority of cases, a paid or free counter is installed on the sites, and the resource that provides it carries out a thorough analysis of the site and keeps statistics on visits, which can be found at any time. Especially the use of such counters is in demand if a person places his own site on a free hosting. Considering what a log is, it is important to learn how to work with such counters, since, in fact, they include most of the necessary data.
The vast majority of hosting providers that provide paid hosting, initially give their customers the opportunity to use the analysis tools that are already installed in the created site. For example, Apache servers use a specialized utility called Webalizer, which is used as an additional server module.
Those who use paid hosting can also completely independently process all the data regarding their site, since the webmaster, who knows what the site’s log is and how to use it, has full access to all the necessary information.
What is it?
Every site has its own log, which the webmaster can look at at any time convenient for him. What is a log? This is a separate text file that contains information regarding all requests to the site, as well as regarding various errors related to these requests.
How is data written to the log?
Initially, the user types the address of a specific site in his browser and goes to it. After that, the user's browser starts sending to the server on which this site is located, a request for the issuance of a web page of interest to the user. Along with this server the following information is provided:
- Visitor's IP address.
- The exact time the request was made.
- The browser that the user uses.
- The operating system that the user is using.
- The page that interests him.
- The address of the page from which the transition to the target was made.
After that, the server receives the request of interest to the visitor, and all information regarding the transaction is executed in the event log, creating the so-called log file.
A competent analysis of the site’s logs allows the webmaster to determine how his resource is used and in which direction it is more relevant to develop it.
What information do the logs give?
Looking through the site’s logs, you can find a huge amount of useful information that will improve the further promotion of the resource and make it more effective:
- Attendance . Of course, such an indicator is also determined by the standard counter that can be present on each page, but in the log these data are provided in more detail, including attendance by days, hours or months. Also, through the use of logs, you can determine the hours of a surge or a lull in traffic, which is extremely important to know when servicing a site.
- Traffic In this case, both the traffic of each individual page and the total website traffic for a certain period of time are provided.
- Conversion. This parameter allows you to determine how visitors navigate through your resource, that is, they viewed one page and closed or still began to "travel" through your site, viewing one page after another. The conversion level allows you to indirectly determine the quality of your site.
- Abandoned pages. Considering what server logs are, you can often determine that they contain abandoned pages, that is, those that are visited extremely rarely. In such a situation, the webmaster must conduct a thorough analysis of the situation, because it may be that the pages have ceased to interest people or it has become difficult to find among many others on your site.
- Popular pages. The web pages that are most visited. You can use them as a model in the process of creating other pages, and if necessary, you can also direct users from these pages to any others that are abandoned or less popular.
- Searches. Among other things, the site’s logs also show the effectiveness of those meta tags, keywords, and the names of the web pages that you used and by which one or another search engine could find your site. Accordingly, the logs contain data about which particular search engine for your particular request found your site.