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Every time a visitor comes to your website and looks at a page, image or other file, a record is made of that that event. Each event is recorded as a line in a file called the log file. A lots od data, but a lot of information too if you know how to get at it.
As you can imagine the amount of data can be huge. There’ll be line after line of entries, detailing each and every image, HTML file, PDF etc. downloaded. It’s obviously impractical to wade through megabytes of data to find out where people are going on your website, and what they are looking at, but the good news is – you don’t have to! Log file analysis tools are able to analyse the log file data and extract the relevant and interesting information. From the log files you can tell where visitors come from, if they come via a search engine, what they are looking for, where they go on your website, where they leave and lots, lots more.
Slightly technical bitThe type of data stored on each line can vary, as can the format of the line. There are a number of different line formats, including NCSA Common Log File Format, NCSA Combined, NCSA Extended, W3C Extended Format, Apache (in which you can define standard or non-standard formats), Microsoft IIS and many more. Some of these are configurable, which means that the number of different formats is practically infinite. A typical log file entry would be, 127.0.0.1 - - [25/Dec/2002:16:08:46 +0100] "GET /spacer.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 564 "http://www.chorial.com/index.htm" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)" The entry above records the IP address of the visiting browser, the date of the visit, what it was getting (in this case the image called “spacer.gif” probably a small formatting image in the page) the version of HTTP used, the status of the request (200 means success) the number of bytes downloaded, the referring page, and details of the visitor (in this case the browser was Mozilla/4.0 compatible, actually Microsoft Version 6.0, and it was running on a Windows NT 5.1 machine). Notice the log files doesn't show the name, postal address or any “private” information about the visitor. From entries like these it's possible to work out a lot about the visitor did what kind of experience they had while browsing your website. SummaryLog files record each item downloaded from your website, be it an HTML page, an image, PDF or whatever. Log files are often huge, and are of limited use without analytical software.
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