Practical Web Traffic Analysis

Once you've got a web site up and running it is all too easy to sit back and relax. But how do you know you did a good job? How can you improve the site you have based on real user behaviour? Without getting feedback from your users, how will you find out how it's being used?

Web traffic analysis allows you to gain some insight into your site users: where they come from, what pages they like, and how often they come back. However, as statistics are prone to being misinterpreted, your insight often has to be taken with a pinch of salt. This book takes you through the process of analysing your traffic, without taking for granted the statistics that you generate.

Assuming you have a web site, reading this book will help you learn:

 - The techniques for gathering data on your users.
 - Standards and Guidelines you should adhere to when interpreting your data.
 - What other sites are doing to ensure they respect the privacy of their users.
 - Insight into how real sites use web traffic analysis
 - Major case case studies from BBC News Online, eBAy, and ASPToday
 - Additional material from The Onion, SmartGirl, and The New York Times.

Who is the book for?

This book is for any web professional who wants to understand their site traffic. It's also for anyone with an interest in finding out where their site is most used, and how to make comparisons with other sites. To get the most from this book, you'll need access to log files for your web site as they contain the information we'll show you how to analyze.

The book discusses the privacy practices of The Onion, SmartGirl, and The New York Times, as well as examining in detail the traffic analysis techniques used by BBC News Online, eBay, and ASPToday.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 - Analytic Techniques
  Comparative overview of Analysis Methods
  The Skeptical Analyst
  Standards for Web Traffic Analysis
  Metrics
  The Rules of Web Traffic Analysis
  Summary

Chapter 2 - Dealing with Log Files Yourself
  Dealing with The Token
  The Database
  Using the Data
  Summary

Chapter 3 - Privacy
  What are the issues?
  The EU Directive and Safe Harbor
  COPPA
  The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P)
  Privacy Case Studies
  Summary

Chapter 4 - BBC News Online Case Study
  Background and Overview
  The Traffic Information We Gather
  Overview of Technical Architecture
  Three Requirements of our Traffic Analysis
  Drilling Down into User Behavior: The One-Hit-Wonder Phenomenon
  Analyzing Extreme Deman: September 11th, 2001
  News Service or Archive Service?
  Summary

Chapter 5 - eBay Case Study
  What is eBay?
  eBay's Web Analytics System
  Putting it to Real Use
  Summary

Chapter 6 - ASPToday Case Study
  Content and Visitor Profile
  History and Background
  Role of Web Analytics
  Overview of Web Hosting Architecture
  Example 1: Regular Visitors, Frequent Viewers
  Example 2: Topic Interest
  Example 3: Monitoring Campaigns and Schemes
  Example 4: PDF Site Analysis
  Example 5: Editorial Strategy
  Summary