|
1st Singapore Web Hosting
> Web Site Hosting
What's In The Mysterious Log File?
First things first, if you web hosting service
provider doesn't allow you to download the raw log file, just go
away. You need the raw log file to study and improve your web site
performance.
What's A Log File?
Every time someone visits a page on your site, a record
is made into the log file, which is saved on your server. You can
find some interesting and useful information about the visitors in
the log file.
Though log file formats vary, here I discuss the
common elements.
Here's the contents of a single line of the log
file from this site.
165.21.154.9
- - [03/Jul/2003:06:39:23 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200
15549 "http://www.working-at-home-business.com" "Mozilla/4.0
(compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; http://www.working-at-home-business.com)"
Lets see what's inside one by one.
User IP Address
165.21.154.9
This is the IP address of the visitor to my site.
It tells you where the visitor is from. If you do a reverse DNS look-up on this IP number at
All-Nettools
the
result is bbcache-9.singnet.com.sg which belongs to "Singapore
Telecommunications Pte Ltd". You really can't go
further than that to identify a particular person. Otherwise, the
Internet would be too dangerous;-)
Yeah, that visitor was myself.
Date/Time
03/Jul/2003:06:39:23
The exact time of the visit. Combined with the IP address,
it enables you to follow a particular visitor sequentially from page
to page on your site. More on this later.
GMT offset
0400
This is the number of hours from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). So
in our example the offset is 4 hours from GMT.
Action
"GET / HTTP/1.1"
This is either GET or POST. Except for a few CGI programs, this
will typically be GET. That is, get a web page or an image that
goes on that page.
This line records a command from my own browser to
GET a web page from the root directory (Notice the slash
"/"after GET) using a protocol named HTTP/1.1. This is
the index page of our web site.
Another example.
"GET /promotion/index.shtml
HTTP/1.1"
It records a request of this URL: http://www.1stsingaporewebhosting.com/promotion/index.shtml
Return Code
200
The next item tells whether the action was successful or not.
Our example is a return code of 200, which means "Successful
Loaded". You've probably got the dreaded 404 "File Not
Found" error code when the web page you were trying to find
wasn't at that URL, so these return codes aren't entirely new to
you.
Other common return codes include:
400 - Bad Request
401- Authorization Required
403 - Forbidden
500 - Internal Server Error
Size
15549
This is the size of the file sent, in this case
15549 bytes
Referrer
"http://www.working-at-home-business.com"
This tells us the web page where the visitor came from. In our
example http://www.working-at-home-business.com ,
which is also run by us.
You will find another extremely important piece of
information here: the keywords by which your visitors found you.
For example:
"http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=web%20hosting%20singapore"
It tells you someone found this page at Yahoo,
using the keywords "web hosting singapore".
By studying referrer information, you will
know exactly which search engine brings your how many visitors,
what they were looking for when they found your site, which links
partner is more valuable...then you will know how to spend your
advertising dollars wisely.
Browser/Platform
"Mozilla/4.0
(compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; http://www.working-at-home-business.com)"
The final field in the log file tells you what web browser and
operating system the visitor is using.
Mozilla is a code name that indicates the browser is
Netscape-compatible. In this case, the visitor was using IE6.0 on a Windows
NT operating system.
Why my URL is at the end again? Just a little fun.
I customized my browser a bit. You won't see it anywhere else
unless I did visit your web site;-)
Tracing A Visitor
Here comes the more interesting part. Lets take a
closer look at the log file and
see how a visitor passes through your site. I will be abbreviating
the log file to simplify this for you.
03/Jul/2003:06:39:23 GET /
03/Jul/2003:06:39:52 GET /webhosting/index.shtml
03/Jul/2003:06:40:36 GET /newsletter/index.shtml
03/Jul/2003:06:41:04 POST /cgi-bin/followup/auto_followup.pl
03/Jul/2003:06:41:05 GET /newsletter/subscribed.shtml
03/Jul/2003:06:41:21 GET /promotion/index.shtml
03/Jul/2003:06:41:27 GET /promotion/articles.shtml
03/Jul/2003:06:41:38 GET /promotion/top10.shtml
First, the visitor went to the homepage of
1st Singapore
Web Hosting, then web hosting
section to find out more about web
hosting package. And then looked at newsletter
page and filled up the subscription form. Our CGI
script processed the form and the visitor was redirected
to "thank for subscription" page. This visitor
continued reading some articles in Web
Site Promotion section.
I've skipped all the requests for images.
Why should you analyze a visitor's path? Because only when you do that, you begin
to discover how a visitor uses your site: which door and from
where she comes
in, what interests her most, and where she leaves. Lots of small
scientific observations will add up to an accurate picture of what
a visitor actually does on your site.
That information is
priceless if your goal is to optimize the experience, and lead
your visitor to the most important parts of your site.
Feel free to use this article in your
publication or web site.
It's pre-licensed to you.
The only requirement is to include this resource box:
|
Article by Zac Hewlett at
1stSingaporeWebHosting
Visit http://www.1stSingaporeWebHosting.com
for more
web site design and promotion articles, proven online
marketing tips and techniques.
|
More Web Site Hosting
Articles
| 
