Take Off Your Blindfold! Discovering your visitors' thinking
using your log files
After 2 years of designing Web Sites, I decided to take a peek
at one of my customer's log files. My fear disappeared after
about 10 seconds of looking at it. In the midst of some weird
symbols and long lines of funny characters, was able to see
something familiar. It was the site's web address! Of course!
That is what people see when they come to this site and that is
what the web server writes in the log file!
I got very excited because all this time that I have read about
log files, I kept ignoring it. I thought "they are not for me -
they are for the real geeky web professionals who spend their
time decoding this stuff". Wrong! They WERE for me. They were
meant to help me track my customers' success and I never
bothered to look.
By the way, if you have never seen a log file, here is one line
from my customer's web site's log file:
200.29.64.28 - - [06/Sep/2000:23:20:38 -0400] "GET / HTTP/ 1.0"
200 1074 "www.mamma.com/Mamma?p1=1&timeout=4&query=phot
os+seniors&qtype=0&x=1&y=11" "Mozilla/2.0(compatible; MSIE 3.02;
AK; Windows 95)"
The most important piece of information to you, as a web
designer, in this line is
www.mamma.com/Mamma?p1=1&timeout=4&
query=photos+seniors&qtype=0&x=1&y=11
because it tells you how the user found you. Did he find you
through the link from another web site where you advertise? Did
he just type your web address in the location bar because he
already knew it? Or did he find it through a Search Engine
query?
According to the log file, the visitor went to the web site
www.mamma.com and did a search. What was he searching for? If
you can't read the text beyond www.mamma.com, then try this
trick:
Open your Internet browser and paste this line
www.mamma.com/Mamma?p1=1&timeout=4&query=
photos+seniors&qtype=0&x=1&y=11
in the location bar. Press "Enter". Ta-da! Now you should be
able to see that the user typed in "photos seniors" into the
search box, because it is in the box right now. Right at the top
of the web site.
My customer's web site is number 9 on the first results page. It
is a success! Now, it would not be a success if the user typed
in "jeep photos" and my customer's site would come up number 9.
Because the user is not looking for a photographer, which is
what my customer is.
That is why you always want to know what is in your log files.
If you go beyond 20 visitors a day, you should probably get a
software that analyzes your log files and comes up with a
report. But to get a feel for how your visitors get to your site
- the above technique is recommended. If this site was found by
someone looking for photos of a jeep, I would think "there is
something seriously wrong with the site" and immediately improve
the keywords, title and META tags.