Shedding my sales responsibilities has given me a bit more time to take closer looks at marketing data and resources. I feel almost like I’m squandering my time, but I hope what I may find is valuable. This morning I ran my web-access reports for August. Studying them closer, I noticed a referrer from a competitor’s site–so I started digging. Here are some tidbits I found looking thru my server logs and reports:
- Above mentioned referrer is junk, caused by a crawler/bot called Zeus.
- There are a number of other bots hitting my site heavily, including noxtrumbot, ichiro, & nutch.
- Hmmm, are these bots inflating my access stats?
- Back-tracking on a Google Syndication referrer brought me to a link/engine-spam farm.
- Firefox hits are now 9.9% of accesses!
Overall, I’ve decided that the access data has been pretty uniform over time to the point where trend-tracking is not valuable. That means that I can change to a different web-access tracking method. Why change? Well, to get those bots out of my access-stats for one. That might give me a better view of actual site traffic. And the client-side tools give a better picture of usage, too. Client-side measurement has been on my to-do list for a while.
hi dave,can u say what tool you are currently using for your web access reports? and what’s the new tool that u plan 2 use?am into marketing too & i wud like 2 know a lil’ more abo’ using the webaccess logs goldmine more effectively. fyi, our guys use a javascript too (think thats what you mean by client side tracking)
hi dave,can u say what tool you are currently using for your web access reports? and what’s the new tool that u plan 2 use?am into marketing too & i wud like 2 know a lil’ more abo’ using the webaccess logs goldmine more effectively. fyi, our guys use a javascript too (think thats what you mean by client side tracking)
I am currently using < HREF="http://www.order1.net/links/affiliate.cgi?ckey=mach5&akey=b2blog&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmach5.com%2Fproducts%2Fanalyzer%2F" REL="nofollow">FastStats<> to analyize the access, then save page hits to an excel spreadsheet to get a month-to-month comparison. You make an interesting point that watching the logs <>and<> the client-side activity makes more sense.As to javascript/client-side tool, I will be shopping for one. Any recommendations?
the client-side activity makes more sense.As to javascript/client-side tool, I will be shopping for one. Any recommendations?
thanx dave.we use the following combo :awstats for analyzing logs & a customized < HREF="http://www.phpopentracker.de/en/index.php" REL="nofollow">phpOpenTracker <> for the client side scripting. the thing is results vary (of course coz of diff metrics like how each views session times etc)
for the client side scripting. the thing is results vary (of course coz of diff metrics like how each views session times etc)