WebHints: Web Management: Measuring Traffic

In order to see if anyone is looking at your web at all, you need to measure the traffic to your web. The simplest way to do this is to add a counter to your home page. This will give you a rough idea of how many people hit your home page.

However, counting home page hits provides only a rough measure and sometimes no sensible measure at all. Thanks to search engines such as AltaVista, people are now entering webs through all of their web pages. Sometimes the traffic can be very unexpected. For example, in one unusual case, less than 1% of people visiting a web entered through the home page!

A more sophisticated analysis of a web can be made by analysing the web's webserver log file. All webservers generate a file that records all hits to the server's webs. By analysing the file all sorts of reports can be generated.

Rocksoft has produced a webserver logfile analyser called WebTune that will analyse your webserver logfiles and generate reports that describe the behaviour of users interacting with your web. Check it out:

WebTune advanced web analysis software.

A full discussion of webserver log file analysis is out of the scope of this web. However, more information is certainly available by exploring the webs of the various vendors that provide webserver log file analysis products:

Webserver logfile analyser software list.