Mining Your Server Logs


If you're not a member of the IT cabal, the phrase server logs could bring a blank look to your face. Not to worry. We explain this mysterious data-mining tool and how to use it to better market your Yahoo! store.

Let's start at the top, with server logs. Every Web server keeps track of the number and type of hits your site receives and where they come from. The information is all there, but it's buried in that black box of the Web server that hosts your Yahoo! store. To grasp this data and make sense of it, you need the Rosetta Stone of a Web log analysis programs: a Web analytical and statistics tool.

A site log analysis program can provide some important information. First, it gives you a set of general reports about the traffic to your site, including the number of page views, visits, and unique visitors for any time period you choose. The general reports also give the average visits per day, average page views per day, average page views per unique visitor, and average visitor length. Visits can be tracked by IP addresses, domain names, and cookies.

Second, these reports can tell you where your visitors are coming from, including their geographical location, what type of browser was used, what pages were most commonly used to enter your site, and what visits were referred by which search engine and from other URLs.

Third, the reports can tell you on what page visitors entered your site and on what page they left.

That's all well and good, but how can you use this data for marketing purposes?

Armed with this kind of information, you can discover how well your advertising and promotion campaign is doing and whether it's worth the return on investment (ROI), what Web pages (that means information) seem to be of most interest to site visitors, how well (or not so well) visitors navigated your website, and what the ratio is of visitors to purchases at your site (that is, how well you're pitching your product or service and what your close ratio is).

Let's consider this market intelligence one at a time.

Advertising and Promotion

You're spending money on banner ads, keywords, search-engine placement, newsletter advertising, email marketingeven offline advertising vehicles such as magazine, newspapers, radio, and TV. As a businessman once said, "I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I don't know which half." Not so on the Web. Using your log reports and assigning unique landing pages for each advertising program, you can determine right away whether a particular form of advertising is pulling traffic to your site. The log reports can even give you a way to compare one type of advertising vehicle against another, to see which one works best. This way, you can find out what half of your adverting budget is wasted and target all of it to advertising and promotion vehicles that yield the best results.

Improving Your Value Proposition

Your visitors don't always enter your site through your home page. Other entry points (landing pages) include pages listed in search-engine results such as Google, pages bookmarked by visitors from earlier visits, and pages sent to others as referrals to your site. Why is this important? Because your visitors are telling you what pages they find to be of most value. Your server reports list the most popular entry pages on your site. So, here's a hint: Look these pages over and see why they are so popular. Then, apply that information to your home page. Your visitors are telling you in no uncertain terms how you should frame your value proposition, and that should be prominently displayed on your home page.

Finally, the pages from which your visitors exit your site are just as important as the pages through which they enter it. Here, your visitors are telling you that either they've either found all they need to know or they found that the pageand, thus, your siteis no longer worth visiting. Review those pages and see why they are driving visitors from your site.

Optimizing Your Navigation

Your site logs can help you track your visitors around your site (with a click trail). They tell you whether visitors navigated your site using your search box, links on your master navigation bar, hyperlinks, or the sublinks on page columns. Why is this so important? Think of your website as a physical store.

There's a reason the most popular products sold in a store are in the back: Visitors have to pass other merchandise that they might not have thought of buying. This is called merchandising. Understanding your visitor's traffic patterns can give you the opportunity to present merchandise to them in the context of their visit. The traffic logs (click trails) can also help you identify bottlenecks or confusion in your site-navigation structure that might be frustrating visitors and driving them from your site.

Calculating Your Close Ratio

One of the most important pieces of data that a server report can provide relates to your close ratio. This is the ratio between the number of site visitors and actual sales. Your server report can tell you how many times an average consumer visits your site before making the first purchase. How many times before making a second purchase? Or a third? Taking these ratios as a benchmark, you can use the information that the server reports generate to improve your advertising campaigns, value proposition, and navigation structure, to enrich your visitor-to-purchase ratio.




Succeeding At Your Yahoo! Business
Succeeding At Your Yahoo! Business
ISBN: 0789735342
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 208

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