Web Log Analysis -- know your visitors.
The main reason for doing web log analysis is to discover what your visitors are looking for, discover whether your advertising is bringing hits to your site, and discover if your visitors are converting to customers.
Your web server is probably configured to provide daily, weekly and monthly web logs. Most ISPs provide you with static web reports, but these don't really give you much insight into how your visitors behave. Instead you get graphs that tell you which are the most popular landing pages, and what the most popular referrers are. Top Drop Allows you to do more than that.
What pages did a visitor see?
Top Drop organizes the pages of your website into a tree view, on the top left of the program, showing you how many page impressions there were at or below given level in your website, and how much bandwidth was consumed by visits to that level of the tree and below.
The tree is organized by domain, if you have more than one domain on your website, and you can see exactly which visitors came to a given page by double clicking that level in the tree.
Discover where a website visitor went on your site
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By double clicking on a page in the tree, you are presented with a window showing you how many visitors saw that particular node and listing the reverse DNS entry for their IP address. In addition, you can click the report button, and get a list of all of the pages that were visited by all of the users in the report. You can also double click on one of the addresses, or select one and click the "Highlight Address" button to find that user in the list of visitors. You can then double click the highlighted visitor, to get a report of which sites they visited, and also highlight the referrer in the bottom window. Finally, by double clicking the referrer in the bottom window, you can jump straight to the website that delivered the user to you in the first place. |
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A Report showing the visit footprint at a website
As you can see to the right, you can see the reverse IP name lookup, and the country the user visited from, the website that referred the visitor, and the browser details that were reported, along with date and time the visitor saw each page on a domain on your site. In addition, the status for the page is shown as well as the size. Status codes may include the following:
A full list of http status codes can be found on the W3C website. |
adsl-68-93-187-42.dsl.stlsmo.swbell.net - US
wnpgmb11dc1-169-165.dynamic.mts.net - CA
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Which countries are visiting my site?
In addition to the site visit details, you can also see the list of countries that visited your site.
| Here's a small sample country report, which lists the 2 character ISO country name, along with the number of page requests for that country, and the total number of bytes transferred. You can get this report by right clicking anywhere on the log analysis window, and choosing "Show Countries". |
Countries Report
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Determine if referrers from a site are worth having.
Having a lot of inbound links may do wonders for your page rank in Google, but there is no point if the quality of the inbound link doesn't deliver anything. To help evaluate this, TopDrop's analysis allows you to see the history for all visitors from a particular referrer. To do this, right click the referrer your interested in, and choose "Show History", click the "Create Report" button.
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Here we chose the referrer, http://www.softilla.ru/Audio_&_Multimedia~_i44_p4_m.htm. From the report to the right, we can see that this Russian site, delivers two Russian users who view the picture only. It becomes obvious that this site is simply leeching images from our site, and becomes a candidate for being banned from accessing the site via a .htaccess file. |
ppp83-237-182-145.pppoe.mtu-net.ru - RU
dialup74-56.gazinter.net - RU
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