KARA web logs - what are they telling us...
For about a month now, I have been downloading the website logs that are generated each time someone visits the KARA web site. The report below of this activity is from 5/29/04 through 6/26/04. The report is organized so that images are shown first and then the meaning of those images is discussed below.
This is a summary overview. Probably the most important statistic to note is the "Total Visitors" -- this is a solid estimate of the number of times someone visited the KARA site. Averaging 15 visitors per day isn't too bad for the type of site and level of site promotion we have. This may include repeat visitors -- the total unique IP's is 306 -- due to the nature of the Internet, it it impossible to determine "Unique Visitors", but based on the data, only a small percentage of our visitors have been "repeats" in the last month.
Keep in mind I have filtered out all "spider/indexing" activity that sites like Google do on our site, it is a large part of our traffic. I have also removed a couple of visitors that were generating large numbers of IP addresses and messing up a reasonable analysis of the data.
The bandwidth measurements are important to watch as a site starts to grow to make sure we are under our bandwidth allotment from our web service provider. The KARA website bandwidth is fairy high due to the large number of graphic intense files that are on the website from the presentations that are posted, but as you will see later, it appears valuable to have those files there.
Also note that our site recieved 21,000 hits! This is a standard way of over-promoting a website by marketing people. Saying we got 20,000 hits in a month sounds MUCH better than saying we got 400 visitors :)
The next issue we want to look at is daily use:
Here we see a graph of the number of daily visitors the site has had. Two things stand out: one is the jump to around 40 visitors at the start of the tracking. This is the direct result of Randy's posting of the autosteer field day to the online discussion groups. We will look into this in a little more detail later. The second VERY BIG jump took place just a day or two ago. From the data, I am pretty certain that about half of that jump came from an email that was sent to the NeATA group regarding the autosteer field day. The other part of the jump is a mystery to me -- there are a LARGE number of visitors coming from Oklahoma/OSU that day that look legitimate, I assume there must have been some news item down there regarding KARA or the field day.
Next is the most popular pages on KARA:
This simply shows the number of times a page has been accessed -- Our "home page" was visited 272 times. If you remember we had 441 total visitors that means that only about 62% of the visitors to our website saw our home page, the rest visited other parts of our site. Note that the "technology field day" page received 207 visitors. Almost half of the entire people who visited our website last month viewed that page, a good thing as that is the central event KARA is wishing to promote right now. It is interesting how the other pages drop off VERY rapidly. It seems as if other interest in our website is fairly small and scattered. The one item I found interesting was the "ForSale" page ranking 7th with 26 visitors. It is surprising to me how much access that page has gotten for how little it is used. Looks like something we could promote more as a service to our members (a place for them to sell items to the larger ag community).
The next graphic shows the pages that users first accessed when they entered the website.
As you can see, the vast majority entered through the default "www.ksagresearch.com". Esp. note the early blue line jump, that once again the effect of posts at online discussion groups. The other big item of note is the large jump in the red line -- that is the Field Day page. I am 99% certain that the large jump that took place in late June was the result of an email that Dave Varner sent to the NeATA mailing list regarding the field day. He linked directly to the Field Day page, so we can easily see the results of that. The thing that is interesting is the blue line also jumps that day, indicating people going to our home page, and I really do not know why that was, other than the hits were coming from Oklahoma and OSU??
Now we specifically look at visitors from the links Randy posted on the discussion groups
As you can see we generated a total of 106 visitors to our website from this effort. What is somewhat disappointing is that only 74 or about 70% of those visitors ever made it to the "Field Day" page. Close to 20% never made it past the home page, and the rest went elsewhere on the site. It could be argued that those not willing to take the time to find the "Field Day" page probably aren't good prospects for attendance, but I think we could do a couple of things to improve this situation anyway. First, make the link to the field day more prominent on our home page, and secondly, when posting info only about the "Field Day" or other specific KARA function, link directly to the page of interest.
The next graphic shows the level of detail that is possible -- it is the "organizations" that have accessed our website.
For the most part, these are Internet Service Providers, but we do see some activity from John Deere, ect. This is only a partial listing as well, you notice several ag businesses/universities when looking at the entire list.
This final image is visitors who have accessed our site through the search engines.
When I started this I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of traffic our small site was getting from the search engines, as you can see we are averaging about 2 visitors each and every day. Our web logs also show that all the search robots these engines use to collect there material are constantly scanning the KARA website. A couple of things are disappointing about our search engine traffic to me though. A substantial percentage (over half on Google) of the visitors are from outside the United States, and they almost always access just the PPT or PDF file their search keywords found and then leave.
If you have any questions or comments, or would like to know anything else about the weblogs from the KARA website. Please let me know
Darin Grimm
Created 6/26/04