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Converting logs into useful information

May 16th, 2006 · No Comments

An outsourcing log analysis for e commerce operates a number of tools of marketing, web site administration or e-commerce with a comprehensive analysis of “who, what, when, where and how” of customers visited your web site. There are many reasons for using log analysis information, but the primary one is that the data, provided by the outsourced analysis, allows you to get a real picture of what is going on your web site.

The Internet was first used for commercial purposes not more than ten years ago, and its further prospects in this sphere are more than optimistic due to the rapid growth of e commerce. The Internet is characterized by great communicative and interactive possibilities. Thus, taking into account its unlimited informational capacity, you may say that the Internet provides a powerful leverage and favorable conditions for conducting any kind of business there.

However, the first attempts to use the Internet as a supplementary tool for the current business showed the necessity in developing a new marketing trend - cybermarketing. This new trend of marketing, typical for e commerce, was to unite principles of the traditional business with those of e commerce, permitting entrepreneurs to conduct e business in the most optimum way, including such business processes as goods and services advertising, sales and delivery, followed by further maintenance services. The basic constitutive part of cybermarketing, i.e. the Internet statistics, provided by the outsourcing log analysis for e commerce, plays a very significant role. What does internet statistics serve for? In contrast to the traditional business, e commerce needs the Internet statistics as a main research tool. Only think about this. The Internet as a primary communication means evolved the problem of contacts between businessmen and their virtual “clients”. Indeed, when your client visits you in an office, you come in contact with a real person. The case is different with your virtual client, visiting your site - how can you know him? Or how can you find out if he ever visits your site?

In its primitive concept, the Internet Statistics, provided by the outsourcing log analysis for e commerce, serves to register your visitors. However, possibilities of this statistical technology exceed the limits of simple figure data- the properly applied Internet statistics allows to carry out a valuable analysis of the consumers’ market, assess your commercial activity and realize the most successful ideas.

A host of the log analysis tools, as one of the types of the Internet statistics, translates a range of information, based on the content of various logs into useful statistics. Logs fall into a number of different categories, based on their format, source and typical contents. Log content can be information, alerts and warnings, or fatal errors. Alerts, warnings and fatal errors are typically lumped together into a single “error” log or may be further split into specific types of errors or sources. In some cases, all log information is dumped together into a single file, and it is the file content that helps describe what a particular entry is referring to. Companies, specializing in services of the outsourcing log analysis for e commerce, provide numerous web analysis programs and software.

Although it is continually increasing in analysis capabilities, most programs tend to only parse through specific variables, leaving many important pieces of information untouched. For instance, most log analysis software programs analyze the number of “hits” — not accesses — a server receives. In this case, the hit count reflects the number of items (e.g., images) downloaded when a user accesses a particular page. Therefore, if a site has a corporate logo image file on every page, that image will more than likely be the most frequently downloaded — “hit” — item on the site. The analysis information of that type is relatively useless in determining the site’s actual usage.

The program selection and analysis processes complement each other. Depending on the log analysis software used, server administrators are limited to certain types of log analysis. Based on those analysis limitations, server administrators need to know the meaning of the log analysis output (e.g., whether the statistics represent “hits” or “accesses”).

The outsourcing log analysis for e commerce is one of the business intelligence services. The reports generated by the analysis will tell you: how many visitors came to the web site; how visitors browse your web site; where visitors come from, e.g. from the search engine or from other sites, from the United States or Europe, accurate to cites; which pages they viewed and which ones they ignored; whether a marketing campaign is successful; how long visitors spent on your web site and each page.

Tags: Traffic analysis

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