Blogging Re Web Log Data

All you Internet cognoscenti out there know what a web log is – it's the file on your web-servers containing the visitor traffic data for your website, right? Not a Blog which is a shortened version of the term Weblog which came from the use of the data on the "web log" that created the Blog. Got it? A web log really has nothing to do with blogging, per se. And this is really not a blog – just an article with a silly pun in the heading.

Introduction To Web Logs

The web log has all your raw website traffic data and if you are not looking at your web log, that's a good thing. It is fairly inscrutable and difficult to parse. Everyone today uses a web log analysis program to view the data which this program pulls out of this really long (and I mean long, long, long, long) string of data. In fact, it is tough for even the automatic programs to pull the data out of the blog precisely! As a result, every web log analysis program will come up with slightly but consistently different tallies of the data. The lack of absolutes in all aspects of the internet marketing business is a sad fact of life.

The Incredible Data

The data you get from a web log analytics program can be very amazing to the uninitiated marketing person, because marketing people love data. While the data is not absolutely accurate, as mentioned above, it is damn useful data that just continues to spill out of the website without any requirement for sending out people to do surveys, or people doing tedious tabulation of the data – functions that marketing people have historically performed.

This report from Google Analytics shows the native languages for visitors over the last month:

This data contains information in aggregate about the visitors arriving at your website: what operating system their computer is running, how big the monitor is, where they are located, and how they came to your site. Specifically, if the visitor used a search engine to get to your website, you learn what search term was used. The data can also tell you what pages the visitors went to, how long they stayed, etc. And it can match this data up in various ways so that you can tell, for example, how many people from New York used a specific search term in Yahoo's search engine to reach a certain page on your website via a certain path through the site and stayed on the page for over 3 minutes. It can even tell what company you are from in some circumstances. (Depending on your browser's cookie settings and where else you have gone online, some companies can use this data to figure out exactly who you are – but that's a different story).

Measurable Conversions

Conversions in web log data terms are any action that a visitor takes that connotes something useful. Most often that "something useful" is an increased level of purchase intention. Maybe a visitor goes to the contact page on the site. Maybe they download a pdf or request more information. Maybe they sign-up for a newsletter. Maybe they visit many pages on the website. All of these are possible "conversion" metrics. Once the conversions are established you can derive a lot of useful information from the data. Perhaps you discover that people from Florida convert at a high frequency but people from New York do not. Perhaps you discover that people who use certain search terms convert damn well so you optimize your website to improve the Google search ranking of your website for that search term.

NOTE: For checking "conversions" and other more advanced functions, you need to use an up-to-date analysis program.

The Bottom Line On Data

Be friends with your website data. Take your data out on a date sometimes. Give the data a little massage now and then. It can have a lot of value. It can be your best friend for telling you where you are off-base and for developing new marketing initiatives.

Next Month: International Search Marketing

Email Jeb at jblair@praxisagency.com.