What is a Visitor Log?

All servers track visitors by generating the log that details which pages they visit, which files are requested, how long they spend on the site, and much more. Often, these logs can tell you not only how many visitors you've had, but also how many are repeat visitors, which sites brought them to yours (including which keywords they used to find you), which paths they took through your site, which area of the world your visitors are from, even which browser and operating system your visitors use.

Much More than a Hit Counter

Often sites feature a hit counter. We don't recommend these for a number of reasons. One, they make a site look less than professional. Secondly, Internet visitors are used to hearing about sites that get thousands of visitors a day. A counter that shows you've had 230 visitors since last February does nothing to improve that business image. Finally, why would you need a hit counter when a wealth of information awaits you in your visitor log.

Accessing the Information in your Logs

If you look at the raw log file, you'll find a somewhat cryptic combination of numbers, text and indecipherable information. You'll need a log file analyzer to pull the valuable information out of these logs. The program we use is Marketwave's Hitlist Pro, generally considered to be a market leader. Server software vary somewhat in the information they capture in their logs, but a good log analyzer program can present you with very valuable information that will allow you to leverage your website into a very effective marketing tool.

Using Your Logs to Improve Your Site

Another piece of information that you can pull from your logs is something called single page visits. These show up as people coming to your site, looking at one page and then leaving again. You should look at the pages that are responsible for the majority of these visits and see if there's anything that could be turning off visitors and causing them to click away from your site. Possible causes could be large graphics that take too long to download or corrupt Java applets or Java scripting.

How We Use Your Logs

In addition to generating reports for your information, we'll also look at your visitor logs to find information to help us in increasing the visibility of your site online. We'll regularly check to see which search engines are bringing the most visitors to your site and which keywords they're using to find them. If necessary, we'll adjust the keywords we optimize for.

To see more about the log reports we can run for you, click here.