By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

If you manage web sites, then in most cases you wish to know the most visited pages at a site and a bit about the visitors to the site: what pages they visit, their paths through the site, and where they come from. The web server’s log of your site provides this sort of information--once the data has been analyzed. And that is where a web log analyzer program such as WebLog Expert comes in.

A number of years back I purchased a program called Virtual WebTrends, a lite version of WebTrends. Since it didn’t give me as much data as I liked, I created an Access database full of queries and reports that provided a much better analysis of the web log data, but it didn’t have all the pretty graphs of Virtual WebTrends.

With WebLog Expert I now get all those pretty graphs but also much fuller reporting, equivalent to the full featured WebTrends version (which was very expensive). If you go to their web site at http://www.weblogexpert.com, you may try out the program for free, with the cost being $75 if you decide to keep the program, or you may simply download a lite version to use for free. The free lite version may be quite sufficient for analyzing your simple web site.

What sort of information does a web log analyzer provide? First, let’s look at a typical entry in a log. An entry for the log at the sites I maintain consists of 18 data fields. The more important of these are date, time, the file (page) requested, the visitor’s IP address, and the User-Agent, which contains information about the browser and operating system of the visitor.

I have placed the analysis generated by WebLog Expert for the month of March for the TPCUG.ORG site at http://www.tpcug.org/stats200403. Go have a look. The raw log file was a 6.5 MB text file. The log file for my personal site, lamartin.com, for the month of March is almost three times that size. And I assume that for a major site, the log file for only one day could easily be 20 or 30 MB. The job of the web log analyzer is to make sense of all this data.

If you look at the TPCUG analysis, you will see that

• It had 8,177 total visitors for the month
• It had an average of 255 visitors each day
• The average visitor viewed 1.8 pages
• The activity was close to the same for each hour of the day
• The most accessed page was an article on Email Strippers by Jenny Lind Olin (I wonder if these people were really looking for that type of stripper)
• 76% of visitors were from the United States
• Netscape was listed as the browser being used by 51% of visitors. I know this is an error and will discuss it below.
• Something called Xenu’s Link Sleuth was the most active spider closely followed by Inkotomi Slurp and the Googlebot

As I mentioned, I do not believe that 51% of the visitors to the site use Netscape Navigator. And a look at the web log with my Access database analyzer found the phrase “netscape” in the cs(user-agent) field of only 217 of the log’s records. It found “MSIE” in 13,263 such records. I don’t know what phrase WebLog Expert uses to determine the Netscape browser and the Microsoft browser, but I think whatever they use is wrong.

One feature you get with the Expert version is the ability to tell the country of origin of visitors. This is done using a fairly sizable database of IP addresses and the associated countries. A very surprising statistic at my personal site, lamartin.com, was the large number of visitors from China--almost 10% of my visitors. A bit more investigation showed that they were going to only one page -- http://www.lamartin.com/asp/ip.asp, the page that will tell you your computer's IP address. That was quite a surprise to me.

I like the program and find it quite useful in determining what is happening at the sites I manage. It has more nice features that I unfortunately don’t have room to mention. I find the analysis of my personal site more interesting than that of the TPCUG, since the material at my personal site is much more varied than that at our user group site. What people are interested in is always surprising. u