Measuring Website Activity

From Web Smart Newsletter: What in the World is Your Website Doing?
By Eric Holter, June 2007

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Video segment 1 of 12 - click here to watch the full video.

What in the World is Your Website Doing?

1.	Full Video: 19:40
»	Measuring Activity
3.	Hits vs. Page Views
4.	Evaluating Traffic
5.	Entrance Pages
6.	Exit Pages
7.	Depth and Length
8.	URL Display Problem
9.	Content Drilldown
10.	Referring Sites
11.	Setting Goals
12.	Browsers and Versions
13.	Effective Strategies

There's a lot of buzz these days about Web 2.0, blogging, YouTube, and Google vs. Microsoft. Interest is growing in Internet TV, wikis, and social media. And of course interest in old fashioned search engine optimization is just as popular as ever. But what's the net effect? (..."Net effect"--that's a good one.)

Do you know how your website doing among the billions of web pages, millions of videos and all manner of things for sale on eBay and Amazon? Do you know if all the activity of bloggers, RSS feed junkies, and online communities is increasing traffic to your site?

Well, since all this activity is happening on the web, your website is a good place to start measuring.

Raw logs

Computers keep track of everything. Every website request is stored in a log file. And not just page requests--every image, every pdf, and every document request is logged. Each entries contain the date and time of the request, the IP address, the site that the click came from, and whether or not the request was successfully fulfilled. That's a lot of data!

These logs provide a wealth of knowledge, but they're not very useful in their raw form. They need to be digested into reports that are easier to understand. Let's see what we can learn from Newfangled's traffic report. next >

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Comments

Barbara C. Phillips	July 15, 2007 11:19 PM Thanks - very nice, clear explanation of the all those numbers. Very much appreciated.
Erica	July 30, 2007 10:25 AM Thank you! Really helpful. I've just signed up for analytics.