The true purpose of developing and launching of website is achieved only when it is visited by the intended audience. And to gauge the number of ‘hits’ being received by a website, one needs to analyse the website traffic. Once you have determined that people are indeed visiting your Web site, the next step is to identify where they come from, which pages they are viewing. After determining what content is popular and what content is ignored, you can tailor your content to satisfy your visitors. A more detailed analysis of your Web site traffic will assist you in improving your service on the Web which in turn increases the traffic to your Web site. The information about your Web site traffic generally comes from web server log files.
Log Files Whenever a visitor comes to your site — browsing at certain pages, perhaps downloading some documents or signing up for a service, and leaving again — information about him and his actions are recorded in a log file. i.e Every communication between a client browser and a Web server results in an entry in the server’s log file. A busy Web site, generates hundreds or thousands of log entries per hour and compiles them in a log file. A raw log file entry looks something like this:
202.144.109.226 - - [09/Mar/2003:11:01:50 +0500] "GET /ministry.htm HTTP/1.0" 200 70342 "http://goidirectory.nic.in/goibody.htm" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)"
As you can see, this entry shows where the visitor came from, what page was requested, when it was requested, which referred the page, and even what browser and OS they were running. However, one can not learn much just by looking at the raw log files. To get the most out of the data, you need to have the details of the hits on your web site, and comparative analysis of figures over time. That is where WebStat – Web site traffic analysis service comes in.
WebStat
WebStat Service takes the raw log file data and converts it into meaningful information about your Web site traffic.
WebStat works in three stages: gathering the data, analyzing the data, and reporting on the data. In the first stage, it takes the daily log files from the server and parses it into a common format to extract the data. During the data analysis stage, complex heuristics are applied to the raw data to categorize the data into visits and page views, hits and many more. This analysis might be based on the IP address of the visitor. Once the data has been analyzed it is typically placed in a database to facilitate reporting. The final stage of WebStat is generating reports from the analyzed data. During this stage the analyzed data is read from the database and tabulated into many different reports, each answering a specific question. Graphs and charts are also generated during this stage.
The WebStat Service generates the daily, monthly & yearly traffic analysis reports of the sites hosted on NIC Web Servers and the kind of reports it generates are explained below
Hits, Page Views & Visits You can get the details of the total & average Hits, Page Views & Visits on the site and the total number of unique visitors & number of time they visited the site
Top Pages & Top Directories You can identify which of your pages/dynamic pages/directories are mostly visited and which files are mostly downloaded. It also gives you the list of Top Entry Pages
Top Visitors & Visitor Demographics You can determine who all are visiting your Web site and they are from which Organistaion, Country & Geographic Region .
Server Activity You can get the details of most/least active Day/Date/Hour and the Bandwidth usage(in KB) over the period. It also gives you the hits by day of the week and hour of the day
Errors You can get the complete technical statistics of successful, failed & cached hits and the list of not found error pages. This will help you in fixing broken links, dead images and malfunctioning scripts/ programs.
Top Referrers & Search Engine You can learn where your visitors are coming from. For example, did they find your site by using a search engine such as Google or did they click on a link at another site? If they did use a search engine, which keywords did they use to locate your site?
Top Browsers & Platforms You can get the details of the Visitor’s Browser and operating System versions which will help you in designing the site for better viewing and developing it with relevant technologies.The detailed analysis of your Web Site Traffic can give you lots of promising traffic-building ideas, and also help you measure which ones live up to their promise.