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MONITOR AND ANALYZE RESULTS
Traffic analysis
There are various ways you can track and monitor the traffic that comes to your website as a result of your search engine optimization. With some of the methods you will be able not only to see how much traffic you received, from what search engine and what keywords people are using to find you, but also how users behave after they land on your website and how many of them actually end up as customers.
All that information is available to you! Some of it is quite easy to get access to. Some of it even comes as part of the services you get with Lycos Search Engine Submission. As you scale up and want more information and better and faster reporting you will have to spend more resources, on computers, software programs and not the least - the time to handle it.
In this section we will give you a very brief introduction to each of the main ways you can monitor and analyze the traffic on your website and the results of your search engine optimization.
TIP:
You will find a good and more in-dept tutorial about traffic analysis at DigitalEnterprise.org.
Collecting data, mining data and reporting results
There are three distinct parts to traffic analysis:
· Collection of data
· Mining/analysis of data
· Reporting results
First, you need to collect the visitor data that you want to use as a basis for your mining and reporting. Each of the three methods described in the tutorial have their own advantages and disadvantages.
Second, you need to filter the data - or data mine it - to extract the information you need and make the calculations you want for your reports.
Finally, you need to make some graphical reports of the data you have collected and filtered. This can be real-time or close to real-time reports through a web-browser or printed reports in Word or PDF format.
Sometimes traffic analysis packages come bundled with two or all three elements included. Trackers and network sniffing products usually include all three parts, and server log analysis tools include the last two.
Statistics are not absolute
There are no absolute numbers and standards on the Internet with regards to statistics and traffic analysis. Each method of collecting data multiplied by the endless number of ways to process and mine it makes it virtually impossible to compare the results of analysis across websites.
You should use traffic analysis to track and monitor trends over time for your own website. Traffic analysis can also be used to monitor real-time statistics to tune live ad campaigns.
Click-thru reporting in Search Engine Submission
With Search Engine Submission you get a click-thru reporting feature that monitors and graphically presents the visitor traffic to each of your indexed pages on a daily and monthly basis. It also lists the search terms that the visitors used to find each of the web pages you have indexed through Search/Submit.
Trackers - hit counters
Trackers, or hit counters, are essentially small pieces of code placed in a hidden part of your HTML code. Each time your page is loaded the script calls up another server whose database records that your site had a visitor. The tracking server can also record anonymous information about the visitor that requests the web pages at your server.
From a web interface you will be able to follow the traffic on your website in almost real time. The types of reports and features you get access to vary a lot from one tracker to another. With most of them you can see what search engines people come from, what keywords they used, and in some cases what search engine spiders have been visiting your website.
The advantages of trackers:
· Easy to get started
All you have to do is copy and paste a piece of code into your pages and you are ready.
· No computers or software necessary
You don't have to invest in either hardware or software - it is all on the computer that hosts the tracker.
· Count cached page views
Even if a visitor loads the web page from cache (proxy cache at the ISP or local cache in the browser), and not from your server, it will trigger the script and count as a view. All views therefore will be counted.
The disadvantages of trackers:
1. No raw data
You get the reports you get - that's it. As you do not have the raw data that is used for the reporting, you cannot perform your own data mining or tweak any numbers. You will have to live with the reporting that comes with the package.
2. Dependency of others
With a tracker you are dependant on another company's service. If they fail and loose the data, there is nothing you can do about it.
3. The best trackers are expensive
If you run a large website with many visitors, the best trackers can become very expensive. In that case you can always consider other options.
TIP:
You can find a list of all the major trackers on the market in the Lycos Open Directory.
Server Monitor Log Analysis
The Server Monitor is a small application that sits on the server and counts who is requesting what from the server. The Server Monitor stores the information in a log file - commonly known as a "server log file". The log file is a standard text file with one line of text for each action.
This log file can be analyzed using a number of dedicated applications. One of the most well known producers of such applications is Web Trends.
If you are running your own servers or have a professional hosting solution, you should be able to get access to the raw server monitor log files. In this case you can run your own reports using a log file analyzer. However, for large websites log files can become very large, taking up mega bytes of data every day.
Some service providers run server monitor log analysis off a central server and will provide you with access to online reports. They generally include good standard reports, but you will not be able to perform your own filtering.
Advantages:
· Standard format
Server monitor logs are in a standard format - at least, most servers write in a format that all analysis and reporting programs can read and understand. This, and the fact that there are many reporting tools available, makes it a very flexible solution. Using the same log files, you can easily switch from one reporting package to another.
· Cheap to get started (for a small website)
For a small website with a reasonable amount of daily log data this can be a cheap way to get started with traffic analysis.
· Impressive reporting
Even the small and inexpensive reporting tools have an impressive selection of printable reports with graphs, tables, and explanations.
Disadvantages:
· Huge log files on large websites
If you run a website with millions of page views a month you will have extremely large log files - several mega bytes of data a day. All that data has to be transferred, converted, filtered, data mined, and processed for reporting which will require lots of bandwidth and computer power to perform.
· One more program is one more problem
The server monitor application is one more program that has to run on the server. The more programs you run, the higher the risk of a crash. If you use trackers or network package sniffing you can turn off the server monitor application and save up to 20% of the resources on the server and limit the risk of the application crashing.
· Not real time reporting
Due to the huge amount of flat text file data that needs to be executed, real time reporting or even close-to real time reporting is often not an option. Usually you will have to accept reports aggregated every 24 hours or less.
· Not all visitor actions are available to the Server Monitor
Some actions, like the "stop request" (when a visitor hits the browsers STOP button before the web page has loaded), are not recorded in the server monitor log.
Network package sniffing
With this technique the raw data packages on your network are monitored as they pass by. There is no need to insert scripts in your web pages or have the server monitor application produce log files. It is all handled on a network level.
This gives you several advantages over all other monitoring methods. First, you get access to data that neither a server monitor or a tracker can pick up, such as "stop requests" (when a user hits the STOP button before the page is loaded). You will also be able to access extremely large amounts of visitor data much faster. In fact, with some network sniffing products you can get statistics in real time - for any size website.
Network sniffing in itself is just a way of collecting visitor data - like a server monitor producing a log. However, network sniffing products often come bundled with some kind of reporting software as well as modules to output the data as traditional server log files or export it directly to a database for further data mining and reporting.
Advantages:
· Easy to set-up and run
No scripts to implement or server logs to maintain.
· Free up resources on your web server
When you use network package sniffing you can turn off your server monitor application. This will free up 15-20% of the resources on your servers - that's how much power it usually takes to write the logs.
· Access to all data
Network package sniffing is the only method that provides access to all the visitor data.
· True real time data access
Network sniffing is the only way to get real time data access and reporting features. When a user sends a request to your server, you actually monitor the data package before it hits your server so you can react on it before your server answers the user.
Disadvantages:
· Can be a problem to use on secure servers
If most of your website is on secure web servers, this may not be the right solution for you. Talk with the supplier of the network sniffing solutions you are interested in to find out more about how they handle secure servers.
· Can be expensive
For a small site network sniffing can be expensive compared to other methods. For large sites it can be cheaper.
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