Forum Moderators: DixonJones
Typically they burn them to cd-rom each month and forget them.
At the summary level they are gathering top level stats on traffic and all the ecommerce sites are capturing data but the logs themselves are largely ignored.
Are you seeing anything different? Are you mining golden nuggets from your logs?
Depending on the site and its business objectives, those key nuggets may differ. Certainly, though, undertanding traffic trends, where it's coming from, how long people stay, and whether people get to key action points are just a few key indicators. Error reports are critical, too.
All that data needs to be turned into business information - then people will look at it and use it!
I try to make the analysis cycle start with a business question and end with a business answer. The rest of the more general analysis may be of little interest to most, but I still eyeball it and bring up any issues that I see which might have business value (positive or negative).
An active SEO campaign can definately make use of the engine/keyword referral data.
When it comes to making changes to a site, it's also good to have before and after data to see how trends are affected. If the shopping cart link gets added to a different page or location on a page, does it enable people who land on a product page to checkout faster, does it lead to more browsing/page views.
It's easier on smaller sites that can actually make changes as opposed to the coporate behemoths the almost never do.
Second; My clients have given up on web logs.
Third; My clients find the web logs and their content very important to their day to day operation.
This opens up a whole new set of questions. Is it more cost effective to capture traffic summaries than to review the logs? Or is traffic analysis a waste of time?
Is anyone doing traffic analysis by sampling?
Maybe the are considering Overture vs ad words vs Ask PPC, vs whatever and to make the initial decision they want to know which site currently yield the best conversions, the longest visits, or whatever the key metric may be. We run a few months worth of logs thoguh WT with filters to isolate traffic from ASK, Google and Overture syndication sites and they kick off the ad campaign with the one that drives the highest quality traffic as judged by whatever metric they are looking for in the logs..........
If a client is just curious to see what is happening on the site.....how many referrals did Google send us this month, is our trafic up or down, then there is no need to go beyond a summary report(s).
Some people like to know all the details of what is happening on the site regardless of whether they plan to actually use the info for anything. Some people just like to have a fancy report sitting on the desk for which they are willing to pay $$$$$.
We never go line by line through a log file unless something really strange in WT shows up and merits a closer look, but sometimes do do a fair amount of calculations based on various WT tables and reports.
Many sites use free trackers like extreme tracking without using the password protection, and these can be viewed online by anyone. I've got a huge amount more traffic by finding keywords and phrases that my competitors use and I didn't think of at the time.
Your own detail web logfile is really full of gold (Brett_Tabke's tip!), and the information in there can be used in many ways, not least of which is to find lots of opportunities to improve your site in ways that generate more traffic. I spend a man day or more every month on my logfile, and so far it has really paid off.
Yeah my favourite trick on that note is an advanced search at alltheweb for must include 'extreme' in the link to text and whatever broad keyword I am researching. You can mine many good keyphrases this way. :)
