Golden Marketing Intelligence Mined from Traffic Logs

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
Web Marketing Today, Issue 65, December 1, 1999

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You know more than you ever wanted to know about logfiles, and we've pointed out some log analysis tools. But what difference does this make, really? Is log analysis a techie thing or a marketing thing? Here are 9 ways that intelligence gleaned from logfiles can make a difference in your Web marketing.

1. Learning the Bare Facts

Of course, you need the gross facts about your site -- total number of visitors, webpages viewed, etc. Before we go on, you need to strike from your memory the word "hits." It's a very fuzzy word. Instead, we'll refer to unique visitors (sometimes called unique hosts), pages viewed, etc. ("Hits" can refer not only to the HTML pages viewed, but also the dozen images that might appear on that page, too.) Some programs also let you know how many of these visitors returned to your site.

Bottom line: if you're not getting enough unique visitors or they're not staying very long, you'll need to work harder to promote and improve your site. The number of visitors is directly tied to the revenue you can generate from your site.

2. Visiting the Right Pages

In his book Make Your Site Sell (http://sales.sitesell.com), Dr. Ken Evoy talks about your "Most Wanted Response" (MWR), which could be a sale, or a lead, or whatever else your site is designed to achieve. If you aren't getting people from your home page to your MWR pages, then your site fails. A logfile analysis helps you in two ways:

• Shows you how many people are finding your MWR pages, and
• The route they take to get there.

For example, on my site I need to get people to http://wilsonweb.com/wct/ If I fail to get them there I'm in trouble. That's a page I want to study carefully.

3. Identifying the Routes

But how do they get there? How many come from my home page, from search engines, from the 120x60 pixel box at the top of every page? That's what I want to know.

And how do these visitors transverse through the pages I've developed? I've set up my Web Commerce Today page in order to get an answer to a specific question: "What is your greatest e-commerce need?" This helps me categorize visitors by their need, so I can tailor my approach to their specific interests. How well is it working?

The week I studied http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/ the result was: Requested a total of 1732 times. 915 of those requests were from a URL in a periodical, newsletter, or bookmark file. 200 people left that page and left the site without going further. (151 people came to the page by another means than a link and then left.) That's good news -- 1532 were intrigued enough to click on one of the e-commerce qualifying questions. This is how the qualifying questions broke down. The first number comes from click-throughs from my web pages, the second column from an HTML banner on my site that I tracked separately.

	Links		HTML Banner
E-Commerce Quickstart http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/quickstart.htm?wmt65	715	37%	43	44%
Business Plan Analysis http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/business-plan.htm?wmt65	245	13%	10	10%
Merchant Credit Card Interest http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/merchant-cc.htm?wmt65	207	11%	12	12%
Shopping Cart Program Selection http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/shopping-cart.htm?wmt65	190	10%	6	6%
Improving Conversion Rate http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/conversion-rate.htm?wmt65	162	8%	5	5%
Consultants http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/consultants.htm?wmt65	157	8%	11	11%
In charge of e-commerce http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/company-responsibility.htm?wmt65	136	7%	4	4%
Developers http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/developer.htm?wmt65	99	5%	7	7%
Totals	1911		98

Of course, these categories overlap some, but this logfile analysis gives me tremendous marketing information about the perceived needs in my target audience, and where I should be directing my marketing energy.

4. Tracking Special Offers

Incidentally, here's how to track links from special offers or ads (in this case, my HTML banner). There are two choices:

1. Set up a separate webpage for every offer, and track these with your log analyzer.

2. Give a different URL that lands on the same webpage. You can alter the URL by the code you put after a question mark. Thus both these URLs take you to exactly the same webpage, but will be recorded separately in the logfiles:

http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/
http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/?wmt65

When you set these special URLs up, always check them to make sure they work correctly.

5. Studying the Visitors' Domains and Locations

You can learn something about visitors by studying their domain names. Though the logfile may record IP addresses, your log analysis program can determine from many of these IP numbers the associated domain or ISP. This might tell you if your most important client -- or competitor -- has been looking at your webpages.

You can also tell something about the location of your visitors. Do you want to know the location of the most visitors to my site? Virginia, the home office of America Online, the world's largest ISP. If visitors from overseas stop by your site you may be able to tell from the two-character extension of their domain name: .uk for England, .ca for Canada, etc.

6. Determining How Visitors Find Your Site

One of the most important marketing questions is how visitors are finding your site. A second is how dependent are you on search engine traffic? Are people reading your URL in a magazine or newsletter and then coming to your webpages directly? They are if there is no "referrer" listing. Here's how my site balanced out after subtracting referrals from domains I own:

No referrer (magazines, newsletters, bookmarks)	12,472	45%
Other links	10,950	39%
Yahoo	2,822	10%
Search engines other than Yahoo	1,562	6%
Total	27,806

Considering that I work hard at bringing my Web Marketing Today readers back to my site, this is a good balance. However, the number of visitors who came through Yahoo and searches seems a bit low. I need to work on that some more.

7. Spotting Search Keywords and Phrases

WebTrends reports provide excellent detail about search words and phrases used in search engines and directories. Though I won't spend much time on it in this article, your logfiles should be an excellent source of keywords and phrases to optimize for gateway pages using a program like WebPosition Gold.
http://webposition.com/cgi-local/index.pl?DS1=RP&DS2=AQH-55E7

8. Locating Bad Links

When I look at the errors section of the WebTrends report I discovered three important problems. A wrong URL, a missing picture, and two referrals to a deleted file. I was able to fix each of these rather quickly. Logfile analysis helps you clean up your act.

9. Designing for Current Browsers

Finally, logfiles give me good information about what web browsers to design my site for.

MSIE 5.x	37%
MSIE 4.x	26%
Netscape 4.x	25%
MSIE 3.x	3%
Netscape 3.x	2%
Other (including spiders)	7%

My current analysis shows Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0, as the predominant browser. Netscape's new 4.7 version doesn't show up in this analysis. But the upshot is that more than 90% of the users have a browser that support JavaScript, and a large majority now provide at least some support for Cascading Style Sheets.

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Read additional articles from Web Marketing Today, Issue 65, December 1, 1999