Welcome to Blazingfibre - web hosting, website development, custom software, network administration, technical support - London-based
+44-7944-731-092
 pricing details 

subscription ... £100/year
setup fee ... £50

 options 

statistics microsite ... £100
weekly updates ... £100/year
extra reports ... £25/report

Webserver logfile analysis

  logfile analysis  :: software development  :: order

This service, which is based upon a state-of-the-art, inhouse-developed traffic analyser, provides highly customisable reports to website owners, detailing the usage of their website by the world at large. The reports can be used in many ways, including:

  • to provide management and marketing data, such as total traffic volumes, error rates, most- and least- popular items
  • to guide the adding of features to the website, such as extra functions, content and hyperlinks
  • to guide the streamlining of the website, to improve customer satisfaction
  • to guide the restructuring of the website to increase measurement opportunities
  • to support new management and marketing initiatives designed specifically to leverage the analysis and reporting provided (for example, a mailout which invites recipients to "click the link")

Providing logfile analysis as a service removes from the website owner the need to manage their own logfiles and analysis. While analysis tools are plentiful enough, regularly obtaining new sets of multi-megabyte-sized logfiles (using FTP), adding them to a library of previous logfiles, then running the tools in the correct sequence, month after month, can prove tiresome. Our service means you can enjoy all the benefits of analysis, without the pain of doing it yourself.

To see your reports, which will be updated automatically each month, you simply login to our password-protected extranet. Optionally, we can create a microsite in a private location on your existing webserver, and publish the reports to there.

Our analysis service does things as standard other analyses don't even consider. We filter out traffic generated by viruses, and we filter spammers from referrer logs. In fact we have over 50 filters in place, all designed to reduce error and bias, and improve the accuracy and reliability of our statistics. We separate robot-generated traffic from human-generated traffic. We provide more detail on more things than almost any other analysis service we've looked at. Most analyses provide just the "top ten" of most things; we provide all the data we can find. And they might only go back one or two months - we go back as far as is sensible - 18 months or more. We regularly review our configuration, so that it keeps up with developments out there on the internet. Because we have been analysing webserver logfiles for over five years, and because we analyse logfiles for nearly 20 other websites, we have the scope and experience required to identify and catalogue new developments as they arise. This keeps your stats fresh: when we notice a new search engine out there, we'll add it into our setup, for example.

These reports are provided as standard:

  • analog and parselog traffic summaries
  • most popular search engines; most popular search engine referrals
  • most popular webmail referrals
  • most popular other referrers; most popular entry pages
  • most popular files (whole site only)
  • most active spiders; files spidered most often
  • most monitored files
  • most prolific 404 page not found errors
  • most popular forms submitted
  • most popular scripts executed

More information about these reports is available below.

Features:

  • amalgamate synonymous data items (example: you renamed a page - now two pages are listed in your stats. The amalgamation feature allows you to combine the stats for these two (or more) pages.)
  • set conditions to include only certain items in a report (example: you want to see a most-popular report, but only include files ending in HTML)
  • set minimum thresholds to exclude "noise" from the reports
  • drill down and see reports detailing every bookmark, search, spider, referral, 404 error, form submission, and script execution (purchased separately)
  • add extra reports (up to 200 reports per website, in total, may be configured (purchased separately))

Requirements:

  • Apache (CLF) or Microsoft IIS logfile formats currently supported
  • Referral, Spidering, Monitored Pages and Entry Pages reports require "extended combined" CLF logfile format (which includes referrer and useragent information), or the equivalent setting in IIS (it's strongly recommended this setting be enabled, in order to gain the most from your logfiles)

Note: In order to utilise this service, you will need to either regularly procure your webserver's logfile and send it to us, or provide us with FTP access to your webserver, so that we may regularly obtain the logfile ourselves. How regular depends on the configuration of your webserver; the usual interval is monthly, although daily has sometimes been required.

Background on reports:

  • analog and parselog traffic summaries
    These two reports show "birds-eye" information such as total hits, total errors, period start and end dates, and so on. Both contain a number of ratios which are particularly useful.

  • most popular search engines; most popular search engine referrals *
    This displays which search engines (such as Google) sent your site the most visitors. A supplementary report displays which pages were referred to the most.

  • most popular webmail referrals *
    This displays which pages received the most referrals from webmail sites (such as Hotmail). Traffic usually appears in this report if there is a link to your site in an email, which someone reads using a webmail service, and clicks the link. It can thus be used to approximate the effectiveness of mailouts.

  • most popular other referrers; most popular entry pages *
    This displays how many times all other websites sent visitors to your site. A supplementary report displays which "entry" pages were referred to the most.

  • most popular files
    This displays how many times visitors viewed your pages, files, and documents, across the whole site. Extra reports are available showing this data on a directory-by-directory basis, and/or on a type of file (TIF, PDF, etc). Examples:
    • most popular product page
    • most popular technical support document
    • most popular article or research paper
    • most popular audio track or video clip
    • most popular image

  • most active spiders; files spidered most often *
    This displays which spiders visited your site the most. Spiders are the robots used by search engines to index pages, so this report essentially shows which indexes your site is in. A supplementary report displays which files the spiders downloaded the most.

  • most monitored files *
    This displays which files were downloaded the most, by various site monitoring services.

  • most prolific 404 page not found errors *
    This displays which pages displayed the most '404 - page not found' errors to your visitors.

  • most popular forms submitted *
    This displays which forms on your website were completed the most.

  • most popular scripts executed *
    This displays which scripts on your website were executed the most.

* Note: Reports marked with an asterisk* are also available in an unsummarised "drill-down" format, for an additional £25/year per report.

Contact us to discuss your needs further.