Why I choose data visualization for this project.
If you have a website, it would help to know who is visiting you and what has attracted these visitors to your website.
This article will explain the advantages of using data visualization to monitor the traffic that flows to your website. It may even reveals trends and patterns that you didn't know about.
The Data
Most ISP's provide CPanel which is a Control Panel or file management system accessed via a web interface. Normally CPanel allows a website administrator access and permission to download Raw Access Logs of all visitors to their website. The logs record information such as IP address, date and time visited, browser used, pages, files and images accessed etc. Unfortunately my ISP at this stage is unable to provide access to the Raw Access Logs. Not to be put off, I have created a visual basic program to extract data from the awstats pages via CPanel.
Here is an excellent article explaining how to gather and analyze the Raw Access Logs - Harvesting cPanel Raw Access Logs
Joomla 1.5
The content (articles, images and videos) on my website is administered using the Joomla 1.5 CMS (Content Management System). Joomla is an Open Source CMS which has a large international following.
Searching the Google Trends service which will gererate graphs of the popularity of certain keywords used in the Google search engine. This graph shows the growth of some popular open source CMS applications such as: joomla, drupal, wordpress and typepad
As we can see from this data visualization Joomla is the most popular CMS closely followed by Wordpress. Google Trends is an excellent tool in seeing graphically w
Joomla 1.5 is an excellent CMS for people who are not don't have programming skills such as HTML, CSS, PHP using MySQL(Opensource Database), Apache(Web Server) and Linux (Opensource OS -Operating System)
Those who do have programming skills can create website templates(how the website looks) as well as extensions for Joomla(modules, components and plugins). I fit into this criteria and have created a module that will allow website administrators insert Google Adsense Ads on their Joomla website.
What am I looking for?
Now I must admit I am not proud of the traffic my website is getting so far, which is around 1,000 hits a month. The website is only in it's infancy (10 months) so pride put aside the questions that come to mind are;
1) Who is visiting my website
2) What are my visitors looking for
3) How much and what type of traffic flow is the website attracting
4) What events, actions or changes have affected the flow of traffic
5) What strategies can I implement based on the analysis
Now that I know what I am looking for I can look for a way to visualize the data that may reveal some traits. The visualization tools I chose to use are the Google Visualization API's. They are free and simple to use. The great thing about the Google Visualization API's is you can store your data in a Google Docs Spreadsheet and link the data in the spreadsheet to the API of your choice. Which means if you add more data to the spreadsheets, the Google Visualization API's will reflect those updates because they are linked to the spreadsheets.
Who is visiting my website
I choose the Geomap to display what countries were visiting my website. I created two Geopmaps:
GeopMap Bandwidth of visitors
The bandwidth shows what countries have visited the website and the intensity of the color refers to the lowest to the highest number of bandwidth in Bytes or downloads.
Link to the Geomap Bandwidth of Visitors
GeoMap Hits
The hits in this Geomap relates to how many pages were accessed by visitors and what countries they came from.
Link to Geomap of visitors Hits
What are my visitors looking for
This was a tough job extracting the data from the statistical web page HTML. I created a Windows Application using visual basic 2005 to make the job easier for future use.
Here is a table of the Most Popular pages
Pages Visited | Number of Hits |
| fandangle.com.au/index.php | 6948 |
| fandangle.com.au/ | 3723 |
| fandangle.com.au/component/yvcomment/ | 1610 |
| fandangle.com.au/downloads/mod_fandangle_adsense.zip | 1153 |
| fandangle.com.au/joomla-tutorials.html | 773 |
| fandangle.com.au/about-fandangle.html | 645 |
| fandangle.com.au/how-to-make-films/92.html | 578 |
| fandangle.com.au/joomla-tutorials/88.html | 562 |
| fandangle.com.au/machinima-films.html | 546 |
| fandangle.com.au/contact-us.html | 495 |
| fandangle.com.au/radio.html | 451 |
| fandangle.com.au/daryls-films.html | 442 |
| fandangle.com.au/fandangle-adsense.html | 435 |
| fandangle.com.au/fandangle-sitemap.html | 413 |
| fandangle.com.au/what-is-machinima.html | 409 |
How much and what type of traffic flow is the website attracting
To see how much and what type of traffic my website is generating, I used a Motion Chart comparing Bandwidth to Hits and the chart animates the changes over a time period of 10 months. This chart proved to be very interesting because most of the countries had low hits but high downloads. But what interested me most was that the United States had the most hits and low downloads and Australia beat the US with the highest hits.
Link to Motion Chart
What events, actions or changes have affected the flow of traffic
Having seen the results of the Motion chart I choose a Time Chart that focused on the hits from the United States compared to Australia.
Link to Fandangle Hits Analysis Graph
With this Time Chart I was able to note when the peaks in the time line happened.
A) I activated my website(put it online)
B) I created a Joomla 1.5 module that would insert Google Adsense Ads on a webpage
C) I started writing articles for my blog as part of my University weekly assignment
D) This was the peak of writing articles for my blog
What strategies can I implement based on the analysis
From the analysis of these Data Visualization tools I was able to ascertain information that has show what I need to do to generate more traffic.
Write, write and write some more
write at least one article a week for my website and my blog.
Get the word out there
get the word out there via blogs, forums etc, build more Joomla 1.5 modules that for free download on the website, and get my website links on more websites.
Monitor my results using data visualization
Keep analyzing the traffic flow of my website with these tools to see if I am making progress in generating more traffic.
Conclusion
I have realized, thanks to this University assignment that using these Data Visualization tools to monitor my website traffic is a far better approach to generate traffic rather than guessing and flying blind .
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References
Fandangle Website: http://www.fandangle.com.au
Fandangle Data Visualization Charts And Graphs
Geomap bandwidth: http://www.fandangle.com.au/networked-media-production/123-geomap-to-monitor-website-downloads-traffic.html
Geomap Hits: http://www.fandangle.com.au/networked-media-production/124-geomap-to-monitor-website-hits-traffic.html
Motion Chart: http://www.fandangle.com.au/networked-media-production/122-data-visualization-motion-chart.html
Annotated Timeline Chart: http://www.fandangle.com.au/networked-media-production/125-annotated-timeline-graph-to-monitor-your-wesite-traffic.html
Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends
Google Visualization API's
Visualization website: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery.html
GeoMap: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/geomap.html
Motion Chart: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/motionchart.html
Annotated Timeline Chart: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery/annotatedtimeline.html
Harvesting cPanel Raw Access Logs:
http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/05/28/harvesting-cpanel-raw-access-logs/
Example Raw Access Logs: http://cpanelguide.net/RawLog.txt
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Google CMS Trends: http://www.google.com/trends?q=joomla%2C+drupal%2C+wordpress%2C+typepad
Joomla: http://www.joomla.org/
Drupal: http://drupal.org/
Wordpress : http://wordpress.org/
Typepad: http://www.typepad.com/
CPanel: http://www.cpanel.net/
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