Elements of a Site › Access Logs & Statistics › More on Access Logs & Statistics
More on Access Logs & Statistics
This section goes deeper on each of the major components of web analytics — what each metric means, how to read it, and how to put it to work for your business. Read alongside the Access Logs & Statistics overview.
Viewers / Machine Connections
The number one measurement to watch on your site is viewers. Most sites will not report actual viewers — they’ll show “machine connections.” A machine connection is just that: a machine making a connection to your website. Machine connections will give you a close approximation of viewers, with a few important exceptions.
Some viewers will log on using different machines — a home machine, an office machine, and perhaps a laptop from a remote location — and will be counted as a different machine connection each time. Even the same viewer using the same machine may count as a separate machine connection each time they access the site because they come through a different access port.
This also inflates visitor counts with company personnel. Just before, during, and after a site first goes live, much of the traffic may be company staff, web developers, and their networks dialing in several times daily. As much as half the traffic in the first month can be attributed to internal viewers. By the second or third month, company traffic typically drops to two to ten percent of overall usage, and within a calendar quarter or two, to between one and five percent or less.
All Sites & Key Account Prospecting
Your access logs and stats should report the URLs of those visiting you, generally listed in order of usage. Having the URLs of your busiest visitors is excellent for outbound telemarketing and key account selling.
If ABCCompany.com appears among your top visitors, you can view their website and quickly determine whether they’re a viable prospect. A look at their contact page gives you complete contact information. Even without knowing exactly who at ABC was visiting, your salesperson can contact them and simply inquire: “Who in your company is responsible for purchasing?” — noting that they were one of the most active visitors to your site recently.
This approach has limits at the extremes. Very large companies (like a Rockwell International with thousands of employees) are nearly impossible to narrow down to an individual. Very small businesses or home users who access through a national ISP will show up as AOL.com or a regional provider — impossible to identify specifically.
📖 A Real Example: How Access Logs Led to a Multi-Million Dollar Sale
In 1997, a manufacturing client’s access logs showed a remarkable amount of interest from an East Coast corporate headquarters and its Scandinavian parent company. After three months at the top of the All Sites list, the VP of Marketing alerted his applications engineers to route all inquiries from this prospect to him. What had appeared to be unrelated, “under-the-radar” inquiries turned out to be coordinated interest across multiple engineers. With deft handling, the prospect became a multi-million dollar, multi-year customer. The key was reading the access logs early.
Files & Data Transfers (Throughput)
Your logs can tell you the number of files accessed and the kilobytes of data transferred to visitors. These numbers matter most in relation to the number of machine connections. The trend lines of files and data transfers should generally track the trend lines of viewers.
If you see a departure from the normal positive correlation between machine connections and transfers — say, after a site redesign that reduced image file sizes — look for the cause. An unexplained disruption in this relationship is a signal worth investigating.
Page Views
You can view the number of times individual pages of your site were accessed. As time goes on, you may find that some interior pages are accessed more than your home page. This tips you off that those pages have ranked well in search engines, that multi-channel marketing efforts leading users to interior pages worked, or that specific pages have been bookmarked and are being accessed directly and regularly.
Contact & Inquiry Pages
Every Contact Us page should include a Thank You page that appears after the viewer submits the form. One glance at your access logs will tell you two things: (a) how many viewers went to your Contact page, and (b) of those, how many went to the trouble to actually submit an inquiry. The gap between these two numbers is one of the most telling metrics on your site.
Peak Usage Times
For most manufacturers, usage times in access logs reflect the workweek. Heavy traffic typically occurs during business hours on weekdays, peaking on Wednesdays and tapering toward Friday. Peak times in Central Standard Time generally run from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., reflecting the 8 to 5 business day coast to coast.
Specialty retail clients often see peak traffic during daytime coast-to-coast lunch hours. Entertainment clients can be the opposite of B2B patterns entirely. Understanding your own peak usage times matters most when running time-sensitive campaigns or serving cyclical markets.
Referrer Logs
Referrer logs show where your traffic is coming from — search engines, other websites, your own pages (the last page most visitors saw before the current one), and your web presence provider’s portfolio and case history pages. Referrer logs are listed in order of usage.
When you spot a referrer consistently sending significant traffic your way, consider acknowledging them (at minimum with a thank you) and possibly reciprocating with a link back to them. If a company is sending you consistent traffic, look for similar sites that might do the same — and consider whether an affiliate program makes sense.
Search Engine Terms
Good analytics programs break out information about the search engines used to find your site, the specific keywords and keyword phrases that brought visitors in, all enumerated in order of usage. Besides looking at where and how people find you, pay equal attention to the places and terms with which you are not being found. Those gaps are your next SEO opportunities.
Cookies
Cookies allow you to follow users by the trail they leave across visits. If you’re offering white papers, online seminars, or other gated content, you can request online registration and set a cookie that continuously identifies that visitor across subsequent visits. Cookies can be important in determining conversion factors for marketing programs. Note that users have control over allowing cookies, and a conservative approach to their use is advisable.
Reporting
Your web presence provider should provide a tutorial or walkthrough to help you decipher your logs and stats. Ideally, you and your provider (or IT department) should evaluate your analytics capabilities thoroughly within the first few months of your site going live, once meaningful traffic has accumulated.
Take the time at your first immersion in your logs and stats to determine which metrics are most relevant to your business. Assign responsibility — and set a specific interval, at minimum monthly — for review and reporting of web traffic, and for key prospecting activities if appropriate.
✅ In Summary
Have access logs and stats in place from day one. Use them. Chief uses: key account prospecting, Contact Us / Thank You page monitoring, search engine optimization metrics, and overall trend observation. Set aside time now — for you or your delegate — for regular review of your access logs and statistics.