How important is logging?

[Jon12345]

How important is it to have logfile tracking programs like hitbox/webtrends?

Anyone here not sure a traffic logger and if so why?

My concern is they are quite expensive. I've got loads of sites and little time. Would like to know my stats but the cost seems very high for multiple sites.

What would the cost of a log analysis program be for 15 websites? Or does that depend on traffic?

Regards,

Jon

[cfx211]

Basic tracking should come standard as part of your hosting package. Make sure you don't already have a stats program in your admin console.

There are several free stats programs out there that you can use. A quick search of this forum will show those to you.

Tracking is very important. Its one of the only ways to understand how your sites are doing.

[lorax]

Knowing how many visitors you have, where they're coming from, what pages they're looking at, what keywords they found your site through are all important pieces of information you should have at your fingertips.

Now, I'm assuming that you don't fully understand how all of this information could help you because if you did - you wouldn't have asked your question in the first place! :)

There are literally hundreds (thousands) of threads here that will explain the importance and what you can do with the knowledge you gain from your logs. Unfortunately, there's far too much for me to tell you so I'll give you a list of 5 reasons - in no particular order of importance.

1. Your logs should tell you who referred traffic to you and through this you'll learn who has links to you. One of the most common places to want to get links from is the search engines. Getting links from Google implies you've been indexed and have achieved a good position in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Getting good positioning means more exposure and thus more traffic to your website.

2. Your logs should also indicate what keyword a visitor entered at the search engine. They enter a keyword, your listing shows up, they click the link and get to your page. You want to rank well in the SERPs for the keywords you're targeting.

3. Your logs should indicate the number of visitors and hits. Visitors are individuals and hits are essentially the number of pages viewed. One visitor may generate more than one hit in a session. If you have to choose one, choose visitors but having both will help you gain a picture of how many people are coming and how many pages they're viewing on average.

4. Your logs should tell you what page is the most popular. If you note that the root of your website is the most popular then you know that most of the links folks are using are to your top page - and/or they know the URL of your website and are entering that in instead of finding you via a search engine. You'll need to compare this information with other information to get a better picture of why.

5. Your logs should also indicate trends. Ideally you'd like to see the number of new visitors rising. More visitors means more opportunities to sell them something. Trends are important for establishing the health of your website's growth.

HTH

[Receptional]

Without tracking, you are living blind on the web. You cannot run a successful business without it unless you are incredibly lucky... and if you are, give me tracking and I'll double your luck.

[too much information]

You will know which pages work and which do not.

You can find problems on your site which cause people to be directed away from where you want them to go. (Your contact form, or shopping cart)

You will know if your 'latest greatest' page actually draws any attention from visitors. Or if it draws the wrong kind of visitor.

Not only that, but if you use a dynamic language for your site such as ASP or PHP you can actually set up your own tracking log for free. You can record date, time, browser type, referrer, etc. and then pop it into excel and run some statistics. It's a fairly easy thing to set up.

Before I started tracking my visitors I had no idea how my site was doing. "living blind on the internet" that's an understatement.

[moose606]

I use hitslink, and think that it is worth every cent. I am able to track my visitors, by keywords, by advertising campaigns, and referrers. This will save me a ton of money spent on PPC campaigns. Why waste money on keywords that do not convert to sales?

[Receptional]

moose - are you getting the referral on conversion data to work properly in hitslink? I'm using a white label version and the I gotta be honest, sale by keyword is still eluding me...

[jatar_k]

Here's what I do with logs.

1. I read my raw apache logs to search for 404's, weird requests, people to ban(abuse), spider trails and anything else interesting like weird referers etc..

2. I track the referers to each user by using sessions (and no I don't have issues with SE's and sessions)

3. I grab the referer out of the session if they sign up (or purchase, whichever)

4. I use webtrends log analyzer to do traffic totals from my logs

5. I have a custom php parser that can extract all keyword data and/or SE data from my apache logs

Now think of all the good data that I can get

I can look at the conversion rates of keywords, se's, diferent campaigns I am running. Well pretty much anything actually.

All this (except for #1) takes about 10 mins to run once a month.

[moose606]

Yes, Receptional I can get conversion by campaign, like google or OV, and screen by keyword. Then I can use this info to tighten up my ppc bids and add keywords or remove them based on conversions. I am not using the trial version, but have been paying the monthly fees based upon page views. Hitslink is a major improvement in tracking visitors, conversions, etc. Would not want to be without it.