Basics: Getting Started

What Your Logs Should Contain: Making the Most of TrafficReport

Probably the three most important pieces of information your Logs should contain are:

• The date
• The time
• The hostname (the name of the computer visiting your web site, which may appear in your log as an IP address or DNS)

The above three give TR all that it needs to produce the Visitor Tracking reports.

The URL and Referrer are also pretty important. If the URL is present, TR will be able to tell you which pages of your site are the most popular. The Referrer is great to have for marketing purposes, since TR uses this info to tell you which referri Lng web sites are generating the most visits to your site. If both the URL and Referrer are present, TR can tell you which pathways your visitors are most likely to take when visiting your site.

The Agent is the name of the browser that your visitors are using to view your site. Typically, it also contains information about what OS the visitor is using. If you’d like reports about which kind of browser your visitors have, or their os, then you will want to include Agent in your log.

The PathArgs and SearchArgs are added onto a URL request. Their meaning is site-specific. For instance, SearchArgs might contain a number your site assigns to registered visitors to aide in tracking their activity. Or your server might route URL requests through a data base, in which case the PathArgs might identify the URL. If your site doesn’t use these for any special purpose, you may want to leave them out of your log to cut down on its size.

(The “From” and “User” reports involve items in WebSTAR Logs that are somewhat obsolete, so you can probably leave them out of your log if you’re using WebSTAR.)

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