Crunching the Data

Now that you’ve set up logging for your web site, it’s time to start using that data. Log file data for your site can help you keep track of the following, along with other information:

• Where visitors to your site come from—a national ISP, a company, private ISP, a country, and so on.

• How they came to your site by looking at the referral address. This can help you determine the effectiveness of different advertisements and which ads generate traffic.

• Broken links on your site or broken links from other (referring) sites.

• Data on unauthorized or malicious access use of your site.

• Which areas of your site are the most and least popular.

The log files produced by IIS logging, while in plaintext, are not easily readable. It’s difficult to analyze them just by looking at the raw text file. If you want to see a certain log entry, you could do so, but the log files don’t lend themselves well to summarizing the data, especially when you have multiple web site logs to view. For reviewing log files, log file viewers are necessary. WS03 doesn’t come with log file viewers that provide analysis, so you’ll have to look for another program to use for this purpose. Dozens of log viewing programs are on the market—some are free and some cost money, and there are good and bad ones out there. A few programs that come to mind are

• WebTrends

• Xcavate

• Awstats

• MS Log Parser tool

If you’re serious about tracking data on your web site, it may be worthwhile to look into obtaining one of them.