Axe Software Blog

The new version of AVG is causing some problems for web statistics tools such as Xlogan, as it automatically scans Google search results even if the user never visits your site.

This results in artificially increased statistics for your pages. See The Register article for more information.

Fortunately these fake hits are (currently) easy to filter out in Xlogan. Just click Filter, then tick “Raw log text”. Select “doesn’t contain” and enter “;1813″ in the text box.

This filtering works because the scanner currently uses a fixed User-Agent string ”Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;1813)”, so it is quite easy to detect these fake hits at the moment.

In my case, for this site I found the effect wasn’t too high. Only around 0.01% of the bandwidth used came from these fake AVG hits, and the total number of visitors was skewed again by only 0.01%.

The biggest effect of the fake hits was causing Xlogan to over-estimate the proportion of users using IE6 and Windows XP, as these elements also appear in the fake User-Agent string. On this site, before filtering, Xlogan reported that 63.4% of users were using Windows XP, and 31.6% were using IE6. The actual figures, as calculated when using the filter, were 61.2% for Windows XP and 27.4% for IE6.

Here’s a good blog post about online advertising: The Devil & Online Advertising

There’s some good advice here about measuring a website’s advertising worth - useful information whether you’re looking to put some ads on your site, or if you’re thinking about becoming an advertiser.

Putting advertising on your site

If you want to put ads on your site, you’ll need a good idea of who your visitors are, and how many you get. This will help you to choose the right advertising network for you, and should give you some idea about the amount of money you can make.

Looking at the search terms people use to find your site is a good start. You may be surprised at the things people are searching for, and it will help you to understand who your visitors are and what they want. Depending on the advertising or affiliate network you use, you may be able to choose ads and products that are more relevant to your visitors.

Also, take a look at how many times each of your pages is viewed (Xlogan’s Files Report can tell you this). If you’re in a hurry, you can devote your time adding advertising to the pages that get viewed most often.

Using online advertising to increase visitors

Of course, the other side of the coin is creating advertising yourself to put on other sites and search engines, to increase traffic to your own site.

Google AdWords is a good place to start, as you can very cheaply try out different ads to see if they work for you.  You’ll want to carefully measure your conversion rate, however, to ensure your ads are worth the money. You probably don’t want to spend $100 on advertising to make one $20 sale!

Xlogan 2.0 has now been released and the website has been updated with lots of articles about how Xlogan can help you make the most from your website.

The articles cover a range of topics, from basic questions such as “how many visitors does my website receive?” to more advanced and specialised topics such as “do Google AdWords work for me?” and “how many of my visitors have the .NET framework installed on their machines?”

To find out more about how Xlogan can help you answer these questions, and to download Xlogan 2.0, please take a look at the new Xlogan website.

You can also find out more about Xlogan Pro 2.0 for those of you who need even more from their log file analysis software.

The next step for Xlogan’s development will be Xlogan 3.0 - please email me or add a comment to this blog if you have any suggestions for features you’d like to see.

I’ll be releasing  a new “Pro” version of Xlogan shortly, which adds a number of features to Xlogan designed to help those using their websites to run their business:

If you’re interested in testing this new version, please email me at alex@axeuk.com. I’ll be giving away free copies and Amazon vouchers for useful feedback.

The free version of Xlogan will continue to be available.