To access the Site Log you will need to login to your site with an account that has administrative access. Once logged in, click on the “Admin” menu and select “Site Log” from the drop down. This will take you into the Site Log section of your site where you can specify the parameters for reports on your site visitors.

The first option allows you to choose the type of report you would like to view. This is broken down into 4 main categories: detailed site log, page views, referrals and agents.

Detailed Site Log - The detailed site log will show you every page that was requested (up to 500) and detailed information about it such as the time, location of the user, browser, search used to find it and more.

Page Views – Page views features a few different searches depending on the level of granularity that you would like to see. You can see how many views/visitors you are getting by hour, day and month. This does not break down views for each page; it simply gives you an aggregate of page views for the entire site. The Page Popularity feature will show you the ranking of all your pages and how many times they have been viewed.

Referrals – Referrals will show you all the links that people used to get to your site. In other words, if someone searched “amazing trinkets” in Google and then made it to your site, it will show Google as the referrer. This is a handy tool for seeing where your traffic is coming from.

Agents – Agents will show you what browser that visitors to your site are using. This is an important piece of information that you need to keep in mind when designing content for your site. If your primary user base is using Internet Explorer 6 you need to test your content in that browser thoroughly to ensure it displays correctly.

Once you select the report type you would like run, you will need to select a date range. If you would like to compare date ranges, you can run multiple reports to see how your site traffic is trending. After you have selected the date range, simply click the “Run Report” icon to retrieve the information for your selected parameters.

After you run your report, the results will be displayed in the box below. If you would like to play around d with the numbers simply click the Excel icon to export the report to Excel. This will enable you to more easily compare different datasets.

With the options available on reports you can run a myriad of reports to see various trends on your site. I must point out here once again that the results returned here are for every request whether it is an administrator or a bot which can skew the numbers a bit high. This is an excellent tool for viewing trends and raw data on your site. For more business type analytics, Google Analytics is a vast step up. My next entry will cover using Google Analytics and the benefits of using it for more in-depth analysis.