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.

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.

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 web spiders are automated programs (scripts without human intervention) and its purpose is to crawl web pages and create an index for a search engine database with the information from Internet.  These kind of automated visits should not be included in the visitors graphs (unique visits, unique pages, total requested pages, etc) be careful because some web analytic tools do not automatically exclude this kind of traffic.

Web spiders

With the tools provided it is possible to analyze in detail unique visitors during any period of time you may be interested (by day, week or month).  This metric is vital because it speaks about the traffic-generating efforts.  It is possible to determine, preciselly, if you received more traffic on July or December, which day of the week is better for a new blog entry, or the results of a promotion.

It could be enough to have a list of the places where your users may have a tendence (or not) to be located. But, as Internet is a world wide network, it is just nice to have a map and see where the user is located.

For example, you can see in an atlas-like graphic all the world and all the users location:

Visitors map

If the Web Analytical tool is versatile enough, you could also see some sections from the map, like Zooming in and out:

Visitors map

And finally, the information about the users location is available for free almost in MagnaCounter:

Magnacounter Visitor map

And if you need or desire to share the statistics with your public, or for any other reason you want to see the statistics without having to login, you can do it through a Link like this:

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, it is powerful information about the behaviour of the users in the Public Search engines such as google, msn, yahoo, to name the best positioned ones; but it is also important information to have, the phrases and words used within your website or blog, and that is a special tool that i have implemented and is available for no cost.

1) I create a rule:

2) Select the rule

3) Execute the rule

Here can be detected the Internal Search Engine of a standard Wordpress blog, people has searched for “counter”, “engine”, “people”, “hola”.

Some years ago the popular term “Web Counter” was very used on WebPage and Blogs to have an idea of how many clicks have been done since a start date.  At that time, there were no tools to know more about the behavior of the persons and automated systems that visit a specific web site.

Today it is possible to have more details about the users and it is possible to use a web analysis tool to process that data and convert it into usefull information to take strategical decitions and gain a competitive advantage against other sites in the same business segment.

If you understand how to read the Web analytics, you are going to be able to understand why users are visiting your site, why they are leaving or if your eMarketing campaign was successful.

Is Web Analytics for me ?

Web Analytics is highly recommended for everyone that wants to generate an income or wants to gain or maintain a leading position.  All the B2C and  B2B Web based channels use Web Analytics to adapt their systems on demand.

If you fit in one of this cases, then i recommend that you use some Web Analytics tool:

* My company generates revenue through Internet.

* The conversion rate is low even though the number of visits is high.

* Publicity of product or services is being outsourced to other companies.

* Links have been exchanged with the idea of increasing traffic.

* eMarketing with emails or other channel has been done but it is not know exactly its performance.

* An important web site modification is going to be done and its performance has to be measured.