Web Logs and Statistics
The web statistics is the information that is about the visitors to a website. This information is meant for webmasters who can then analyze who are the visitors to their websites and how these visitors perceive the site, thus enabling them to make it more visitors friendly and incorporating the material that is needed.
The web logs are not the same as blogs, as some may confuse, they are fundamentally different beings to handle and control.
The job of interpreting web logs is a very time consuming and analytical job, and can easily be a full time profession. The navigation patterns, most viewed pages and exit pages all have a story to tell to the webmaster, who if is an expert can decipher the kind of visitors to the website and what the want out of it.
The programs are made in a way that they format the given data in a very easy to understand way, substantiating these with the help of graphs, visual representations and other features that give it in a very digestible format.
The cons of using a software for the web log analysis is that is confuses about what is the most important and what is it that the actual results mean. The only way to counter this trend is that the results should not be analyzed in isolation but in conjunction with the other data.
The critical areas to be examined often are:
how many of the visitors visit each day :- this if taken over a period of time is one of the most important data, a sudden decline in the number of visitors might just mean a series of dropped links or other accession problems.
These details though are only a guess work and do not sometimes give the tru picture in itself, the logs are needed to validate the advertising campaigns and thus the traffic can be tracked. The analysis of a web log is just guesswork and might mean a lot of things. It is not conclusive proof of the success of a particular campaign. Only a general idea can be drawn at the best.
Filed under: Logs and Statistics
