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It's a Hit! Gauging Success through Traffic Analysis
The Three Flavors of Tracking Software
1. Remote Tracking Services
The easiest type of tracking to install, and therefore the most popular, is remote tracking. These tracking services house all the traffic recording scripts and reports on their own servers, which you can log into to check your stats. The recording itself is accomplished through javascript that is placed on your page(s).
Despite their ease of use, this type of service is the worst, for a variety of reasons. Often, it is inaccurate: because the traffic recording relies upon a connection to a remote server (a server that's likely bogged down), many of your visitors may not be recorded because requests simply time out. Additionally, the services' reliance upon javascript means that it fails to record visits by users who don't have javascript enabled. This is a big issue -- search engine spiders don't use javascript, so one of the key benefits of analyzing your traffic (knowing when you've been spidered) is overlooked by these services. Also, remote trackers often require you to place a button or graphic on your site in exchange for the free use of their service, which is not ideal for most site owners.
So try to avoid using these services unless you don't have the ability or expertise to execute tracking scripts of any kind on your own server.
Examples:
2. Logging Programs
This is my preferred method of traffic analysis. Logging programs are scripts that you install on your server, which then generate both log files (either in flat files or a database), and reports. I prefer this type of program over a log analysis system (discussed below) because logging programs afford the site owner more control -- you decide what is logged and what isn't, and only track those pages you want to track.
The downside to doing this is that you must maintain your log files, and if your site is popular, they can grow rather large. On one of my sites (which logs over a million impressions a month) the log file grows by about 15mb a day so I usually rotate it every 3 days. Now, if you use a log analysis program you'll still be battling large log files, however these are your server's log files, and thus they are automatically rotated and maintained for you.
Another added feature of this type of program is that you can sometimes use them to track links from your site as well, so you can identify exactly how much traffic you send away in a link exchange.
Examples:
3. Log Analysis Programs
These are programs that analyze your server logs and then create traffic reports accordingly. Some may include advanced filters, which allow you to specify what exactly you want reported, but most will simply report everything in the log files -- usually covering total hits, impressions, and uniques. Of course, the quality of the reports generated will depend on what software you actually use.
Some log analyzers are free and come preinstalled on many hosting accounts, while others can cost a good deal of money.
Examples:
What to do Every Day
Once you have your tracking software set up you can start using it, but what should you actually look for? There are a variety of things you should check every day as follows:
Referrers
The first thing you should check daily is your referrers. I know from personal experience that if you have a popular site, your referrers can number in the thousands, so reading through that list every day can be a chore, but it's a must!
When you're looking at your referrers, look for two things:
- where in the search engines visitors find your listings, and
- on what other Web pages visitors have located links to your site.
Specifically this will help you check to see whether you're maintaining your search engine position, and it will also help you identify new sites that link to you. When I find that a new site has linked to one of mine, I submit their site to Google so that it can spider their site, see the link, and increase my link popularity rating. Some people would advise against doing this on the grounds that it is unethical to submit another person's site to a search engine, but I disagree.
In the past, some search engines would ban sites that were oversubmitted, however Google has never, and still does not do this. If a page has already been submitted, your request will simply be ignored. As nothing bad will ever come of submitting someone else's page, I don't see this practice as unethical, especially since many of the people who own these pages may not know how to submit their site. Of course, you should make your own decision on this issue.