'Monitor' the visitor to better manage the Website

How can you know your website is doing its job well? The answer you searched for may be right on your server. The secret lies in monitoring how customers access websites, so that administrators can know where the Website attracts customers and where they are not interested by customers.

The term known as 'web analytics' (web analytics) does not describe all the steps in this process. Sometimes not following the 'procedure' properly can cause you to lose huge advantages in website-related activities.

In the past, people were only interested in hits and considered them as the only important index to evaluate the development of the website. However, currently tracking customer access has been viewed much more comprehensively and gives us many statistics. If you are serious about numbers, the statistical results will help you make the best decisions about the website's design, content, information structure and navigation scheme. The information you can have includes the number of hits of each page in the website, the level of search engines in attracting visitors to your website, information about visitors, operating systems and browsers. they are using etc . With such a wealth of information, the problem lies in how to make good use of that information.

Free counters

Important or useless information depends on your needs. For example, you want to develop keyword combinations (keyword) to entice more visitors or to measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign: by placing banner ads, printing Website addresses on publications or putting website addresses on related websites. You may also want to know exactly which content is the most visited, the number of errors generated (according to visitor feedback). Knowing what you are interested in, you will need to 'measure' what information is relevant to users' access.

The process of analyzing websites starting from the simplest work is to count 'hits'. There are a number of free "hit counter" hits for administrators. There are two forms of 'hit counter' settings: counters used through scripts that are inserted into Web pages placed on your server or 'remote control' counters - placed on the server other. If you only want to count one page (home page), you should choose the second method. In the meantime, the solution to directly place the counting code on your server is convenient for simultaneously deploying multiple counters (to compare the popularity among pages). In addition, in this form you can also actively select whether to display the count results on the website.

There are good, free counters. The first is WebCounter ( digits.com ), which is considered one of the first counters to appear online, delivered in both forms: basic (free) and advanced ( charge). Next is FastCounter ( bcentral.com ), a powerful and reliable counting feature. Featured among the counters that allow you to install on your server is Matt's Counter ( scriptarchive.com ).

Remote controller

There are many complex counters, from simple hit statistics and in-depth web analysis. Statistics tools hosted elsewhere can also provide you with almost any information requested regarding visitors. The job you have to do is just register the service and copy and paste a few lines of code on the page. TheCounter.com is a good example. The fee for using the counter of this website is very 'poor' (previously free). TheCounter.com's service provides not only the number of pages per page but also the daily average, reference information, screen resolution index, browser type, etc. Information needed for you to adjust your website according to your visitors' needs. Another service (completely free) is Extreme Tracker. It will 'embed' a link to the site that needs your statistics and can support multi-page metering (see details at http://www.extreme-dm.com ).

Before deciding to install or register Extreme Tracker or TheCounter, check your hosting subscription package. Many hosting service providers have built-in counters in customer accounts.

Selecting statistics from hits is one thing, filtering information from the data warehouse collected on the entire website is a different story. Therefore, the focus here shifted from the way of collecting information to the way of exploiting the collected information. If you've ever seen a log file in a server, you'll see that this file is long strings of characters, storing information about visits. In the file are detailed information about each 'hit': where they come from, the type of query information, the access page, the browser sending the query, the time to send the query, etc. You may have to pay more. if you want to access log files in servers. Some service providers do not even allow customers to directly access (real-time) log files.

Filtering meaningful information from raw data sources is unimaginable if only manual methods are used. You need analytical software applications that can organize and organize information in the form of easy-to-understand statistics. Once you have this support, you will find useful information that you have not even known of their existence before, not to say they want. AWStats is a great example of web analytics application. This application uses CGI code to produce intuitive, graphically illustrated charts, tables for statistics taken from log files. In addition, Analog is also a free option for you. This tool integrates less features than AWStats but allows users to manually adjust the configuration from the local machine. While AWStats requires you to specify the path to the log file before running, Analog allows you to specify log files when the program is executing. This means you can use Analog to read the log files directly on the server (live log).

Another application, Sawmill, also relies on CGI, can run directly from your website or computer thanks to a web server (web server) built into the tool. Unlike AWStats and Analog, Sawmill is a commercial product. Sawmill supports a wide range of analytical features and options compared to free applications. One of Sawmill's best features is its ability to monitor and analyze web directly (live web tracking).

Web analytics experts distinguish quite clearly the monitoring process (tracking) and log file analysis. Web tracking can bring similar data but in a different way. While the server logs store all queries sent to the web server, FTP server or email server ., the tracking services only store the moves directly from the user (stored in cookie and then transfer to the database). Statistics through the log file analysis tool are comparable (many times), while tracking tools only provide statistics at a specific time. In addition, log files also store information that website monitoring applications do not pay attention to such as the presence of 'patrons', visitors from the same IP address or search activity of the Search engine (search engine).

Follow the access stream

These applications can also save the steps of visitors accessing your website. Clickstream or Clickpath - the stream of traffic, shows the effectiveness of the navigation diagram, the ability to attract visitors to the layers within the site. Of course, you can also capture a stream of access through log files but the results are often incomplete and inaccurate.

In order to get information about the access stream, the administrator needs to set the cookies, embed data in the cookie, and then perform the analysis from the collected data. Therefore, most web tracking applications are hosted from the service provider's server. Among the previously mentioned applications, Extreme Tracker is a very basic tool when compared to professional applications. OpenTracker ( opentracker.net ) is available at a fee of $ 16.95 / month, but integrates many features. The collected data allows you to optimize web pages to increase your position in search results, improve your site's navigation and information structure.

For example, you might discover that a visitor only enters a specific area on the website and then retrieves it. With web tracking tools, you will capture the most common cause of this situation to make corrective measures.

If you really want to be more successful on the Internet, you should be serious about the solutions mentioned above. In any case, resort to the advice of application service providers (ASPs) like webtrends.com . These third companies will do your website tracking and analysis; make specific suggestions with the information collected. Of course, even if you use only a simple hit counter or a website tracking and analyzing system (charging), it depends on how active you are.

Duc Cuong