I have been thinking about the subject of the first article for the Advanced Web Stats Blog and I consider important that every visitor of our website is entitled to know what exactly a web server log file means, how exactly they are created and how you can use Advanced Web Stats to get insights about your website using them.

In the following article, I will try to describe the way how web log analysis works and direct you to the right resources which will help you configure Advanced Web Stats to monitor and analyze the interaction of your visitors with your website.

1. Visits to your website

So, the story starts with your visitors. The visitors of your website have the main role here once they land on your website and browse around for information. They might purchase your product or service straight away, look around and bookmark your website for a future visit or just bounce back and close their browser window 3 seconds later. But the most important thing is that they interact with your website. Of course, you are now interested how they do that and how you can get the most of it.

2. Visitor interaction

Now, as the visitors browse your website, the web server where your website is hosted logs the interaction of the visitors with your website. This interaction is logged into log files which are stored on the web server. JavaScript tracking scripts, such as the aws.js tracking script, add additional information into those logs.

3. Web server log files

Visitors are browsing your website and their interaction with your website is logged and stored on your web server. But what to do next to get insights about this? At this moment you need to add the log files into Advanced Web Stats and let the application do it’s job.

To get hold of your log files, you need to speak with the company where your website is hosted and ask them to direct you to the right resources in getting them manually or for the FTP configuration. If you configure Advanced Web Stats to get the logs via FTP, it will automatically download them on a location you specify from your computer and then parse them.

4. Web Log Analysis reports

Once you have manually downloaded the log files or have the FTP settings to access them, it’s time to configure Advanced Web Stats. When you will finish to create a new profile and properly configure it to get the log files, Advanced Web Stats will parse them and display reports with information about your website.

When the profile is created and the log files are parsed you can start visualize and analyze reports about your website. To get started you can check the reports provided by Advanced Web Stats, but also have a look at more advanced reporting features such as campaign tracking or ecommerce tracking.