MagnaCounter Blog

In the previous post i wrote about the hourly graphs on analytical tools, describing how to look at the visits received every hour of the day.  Suppose that you are getting traffic from 9am to 6pm, so , from which country would you ask.  First you should check the country from where the visits are comming, and translate the time to the time to the timezone that you selected for the website.

The conclusions that you can do depend on the websites traffic, for example, at work users usually prefer to visit web sites that don’t have much music or sound because they don’t want that in their office network log to appear as non-compliant to the company.  Individuals surfing from workplaces usually preffer to take care of personal mathers on a break or at lunch.  On the other hand, many adult web sites have more traffic on work days, so it is not a rule to think that people surf only for personal mathers, as i said, depending on your website or community, you have to get your own conclusions but now you know what to consider.

This mather is also important if you are planing a Web promotion, knowing what hours see the most traffic could help you craft special midnight sales, early-bird specials, or even lunchtime-giveaways designed to give that traffic an incentive to become regular customers, subscribers, or readers.

A web analytical report can detail each day of the week, to check for example how many hits you got a Friday.  Here is how to find out the days of the week repot in Magnacounter:

1) Click the daily link

Daily stats

2) Click the Days of the week link

Days of week

3) Click the hours link and look how many visits you got at every time.

Make a note of which day of the week sees most traffic to compare it with weeks past - and get ready to compare it against weeks in the future.

Hours of the day

You might discover that night owls are populating your site.  Or you might discover that the early birds are catching the worms that you leave out for bait.  There are several insights you can glean from the Hours report, for example, when does the bulk of your traffic comes ?  You can accurately assume that most of your users are surfing from work if traffic arrives from 9am to 5pm.

In my next post i describe some users behaviour.

The Web Usage Mining is a branch of Datamining techniques whoes target is to discover users behaviour on a system, in this case we do analyze Web Logs and find patterns on the navigation.

Web Usage Mining

The analysis of this Data can help to find valuable information that can help to know better or more about the Users or Customers and to provide them a customized solution, this goes by the hand of a marketing strategy.

What is Data Mining ?

Dataminig is the discovery of information, hidden at simple view, but that can be obtained from large about of data.  It is a powerfull technology with great potential to help in business, it is used to help decition takes.  A DataMining product is the result of large amount of research and development.

From the family of DataMining, exist these branches related with the Web:

Web Content Mining
Web Structure Mining
Web Usage Mining

In the next post i am going to talk about the MagnaCounter WebMining tool.

There are some web analytics tools that can save the data automatically through a period of time, others do it on demand.  They can be exported to an Microsoft Excel file to be stored, processed and printed.  I recommend that you record the stats by yourself, thinking in the worst case is a good practice.

For example, look at this options:

These targets, expressed in an Excel file would look like this:

You can see this examples live on

www.magnacounter.com

Free Web Analytics

You have contracted hosting space for you webpage and found that it do not includes Web Analytics on their service, this is normal and has free solutions with the cost of a learning curve, i know that many hosting companies may install and set up an analytical application for a price, as an additional service.

To setup an analytical tool you may need more than a simple hosting (just a directory where you upload the html files).  You will need access to the operating system scheduler (also known as crontab), php or perl scripting support from the hosting, and sometimes some graphical library compiled with php.  If that is not possible, a free solution would be MagnaCounter.com.

I updated the most popular pages plugin, with a new look and interesting design, just sharing my creation :-)  Register into MagnaCounter to try it out.

Popular pages plugin

More info here:

http://www.magnacounter.com/GetPopularPlugin.html

Start looking your web targets, you are going to notice how the different graphics change every day and every month, it is not the same a holidays than workdays, it is not the same in March than December, before, during and after a crisis.  This is related with Web Site Benchmarking in some way.

When you reach profits, with the monthly history recording you can know when you have reached your objective, and you would be able to tell others how you did it.

Record History Web Statistics

The monthly history recording sets a benchmark so that the montly progress can be measured.  You can compare the number of unique visitors, page displays, users that returned, fidelized users, unique displayed pages as well as how much bandwidth has been used a given month.  With that information the different months can be compared to determine web trends, like busy seasons or effective e-marketing campaigns.

How to archive que monthly history:

Record History Web Statistics

Download the report in PDF.  Even though, MagnaCounter records the report and you can see it at anytime.

The bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bit/s or multiples of it (kbit/s, Mbit/s etc).  I have seen that the term “bandwidth” is often incorrectly used to describe the amount of data transferred to or from the website or server within a prescribed period of time, for example bandwidth consumption accumulated over a month measured in Gigabyte per month. The more accurate phrase used for this meaning of a maximum amount of data transfer each month or given period is monthly data transfer.

The bandwidth report can include: HTTP, SMTP, FTP or POP3 traffic, what do this acronyms mean ?

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol): The Web’s communication standard, referenced in the http:// that appears at the beginning of every web page address (an extra ’s’ on the end, as in https:// denotes the secure, encrypted form). Stabilized at HTTP/1.1, it defines the universal mechanism for exchanging application-level messages between Web devices. All web services run over HTTP.

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol): This protocol is used in sending and receiving e-mail. However, since it is limited in its ability to queue messages at the receiving end, it is usually used with one of two other protocols, POP3 or IMAP, that let the user save messages in a server mailbox and download them periodically from the server. In other words, users typically use a program that uses SMTP for sending e-mail and either POP3 or IMAP for receiving e-mail.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol): This is a communications protocol used to transfer files from one computer to another over a network.

POP3 (Post Office Protocol): This is a standard protocol used to retrieve email from a remote server to a local client over a network.

If your website attracts a lot of traffic, you should watch the bandwidth to make sure that the monthly quota defined by the hosting company is not exceeded, which, could cause to degrade the web site performance, costly overcharges or deactivation of the hosting /farming account.

Network/Mail/CPU graphic

For more information

http://www.magnacounter.com/help/bandwidthMeasure.html

The simplest web analysis tool provides the option to inspect the latest visits, which are organized by the visit date/time, the displayed page, browser type, operating system and the country.

This example was taken from magnacounter.com:

Last Visitors

This target is excelent to have a quick look at what the recent visitors did on your website.  If a customer has a problem on your website and he tells you the exact time, date and page that he requested, or you receive an email when a critical error occurs on your website, this tool provides more information of the previous steps to do some peritaje.

You can get a closer idea of what the user is searching, and if this search got the correct answer, which was the entry point, if he had to go to the feedback page to send you an email or the contact page with your contact information.  You can know if the sale has been closed or if you loosed your time.

Last Visitors

If you put the mouse pointer over the world icon you get the ip/domainname where the individual came from.

Last Visits

Put the mouse cursor over the lamp, and get the search that the user did on the search engine and that pointed him to your site.  Click on the search and get the same view that the user got and that took their attention:

Last Visits