Nuhdge > Marketing Analytics > Data Sources > cPanel Server Logs

Automate the FTP fetch, data processing and
analysis of your Cpanel Raw Access server logs.

Why is it important to analyse your server log files?

Server log files are interesting, because unlike Google Analytics, they capture 100% of website hits.  Because Google Analytics is dependent on a web browser triggering JavaScript code, it doesn’t capture everyone. For example, some users block GA tracking, and bots don’t use web browsers. So there’s a lot of activity on your website and server you don’t see with just Google Analytics.

What are server log files?

Servers automatically generate log entries whenever a user (a web visitor or a bot) requests a resource from the server. A resource could be a web page (eg, index.html), image that the page displays (eg, /images/logo.png), a file (eg, /docs/brochure.pdf), a PHP script (eg, script/form.php), or other resources such as movies, music, etc.  The server will log the request and capture data related to the user making the request.

Server Logs capture the following data

• User IP address and date/time of request
• User’s client details (user agent) such as Browser, OS including version numbers
• Where the user came from (Referrer URL)
• HTTP (server) request type and query protocols
• Requested server resource (file / page)
• Visitor navigation paths
• server (HTTP) responses (200, 301, 404, etc)
• Data downloaded (file size)

What you can do with this data?

There are a few benefits to analysing your server log data;

• Optimise your website performance
• Boost your SEO.
• Improve UX
• manage server resources and costs
• And importantly, understand your website visitors better

Here’s some reports you can generate from server logs;

Visitors and Page Views
Compare against Google Analytics and get a balanced view of your website visitors.

404 Page Not Found Error Report
with this information you can setup 301 redirects to ensure your website visitors aren’t getting a “Page Not Found” error. And using referrer data, you can identify where the bad link is coming from and rectify it.

Broken Links Report
404 Errors from internal URI’s suggest broken links. Fixing these will create a better User Experience (UX) and help Google Bot index your site.

Malicious server activity
Improve server security and stay on top of potential threats by tracking requested resources by user agents.

Server Bandwidth Utilisation
Understand which resources (files) are generating the most downloads (server bandwidth). You can lower network costs by reducing file sizes, or blocking users if the usage is malicious.

Google Search Bot Tracking
Server logs can help you see how search engines are crawling your website. With this information you can see if all your pages are being crawled and setup strategies to correct this.

Understand user base
See where your visitors come from and what devices are being used to view your website.

Analyse User Behaviour
View click paths of individual users and time spent on each page.

How Nuhdge helps fetch and analyse Server Logs

We’ve created a data warehouse platform which takes the grunt work out of fetching and reporting your marketing analytics. As part of this, we provide CPanel Server Logs as a standard data connector.

We process CPanel Server Logs in the following manner;

• Automatically FTP fetch server logs on a daily basis
• The ETL system validates and parses the log file data
• The structured data is loaded to a queryable database (SQL or BigQuery)
• We then plug the database into our ‘Web Engagement’ dashboard

The Web Engagement dashboard allows you to view a number of standard Server Log reports, as well as enable you to query and manipulate Server Log data to answer your own unique questions.

If you would like to automate your server log data fetching and processing.