ConverTastictm

Where are Your Conversions REALLY Coming From?

Lookup IP Numbers Help Page

Quick Start - Click the "Select File" button and choose your server-log file. When it is done, look in the same folder as the server-log file, and you will see a new file with a name beginning with "CONVERTED-".

You will want to use this window if your hosting company provides only plain, numeric IP addresses in your server logs instead of computer names (hostnames). ConverTastic will run through your log file, lookup each IP address, and then write a new log file with hostnames where the IP number used to be. If you are using ConverTastic to research your conversions, you would do this before importing the log file into ConverTastic's database.

ConverTastic only looks at the IP number, so your log files can be in any format as long as each line begins with an IP number and is followed by a space. ConverTastic just blindly copies the rest of the line, so it makes no difference what else is there.

Looking up IP's can be time-consuming, so ConverTastic keeps a database of IP numbers and hostnames that it finds in your log files. First, it will look in it's database for the IP. If it finds it, it can pull out the hostname very quickly. If the IP is not in the database, ConverTastic will do the lookup and then update the database with the new IP and hostname.

To see how much of a difference this makes, process your first log file, make a note of how long it takes, and then process it again. The second time you do it, it will be a zillion times faster. So, if a person comes to your site, and then looks at 50 pages, ConverTastic only has to do one slow lookup and 49 very fast database retrievals. If that person comes back tomorrow, and looks at another 50 pages, ConverTastic doesn't have to do any lookups.

Click the "Show Total" button to see how many unique IP numbers are in your database. Click the "Clear Database" button to delete all of the IP's in the database. You can do this whenever you like, the only consequence being that your processing will slow down for a while until the database builds-up again.

The number of "Bad Lines" shows the number of lines in the server-log file that ConverTastic was not able to parse. Your web server will screw up occasionally and write messed-up lines. If you see a lot of bad lines, you should look in the log file to see what happened and then complain to your hosting company. A blank line at the end of the file will count as a bad line, but will not bother anything. Your bad lines should almost always be zero.

ConverTastic also shows you the number of IP's it was able to find in its database and how many it had to lookup. These numbers will add up to the number of good lines. The number of IP's added to the database is roughly equal to the number of new people finding your site since you processed your first log file.

If ConverTastic gets an error when looking up an IP, it will use the plain IP in the converted file. When looking at the converted file, you will see almost all hostnames with a few plain IP's sprinkled in. Some ISP's do not give names to all of their IP's, so the hostname is just the IP itself. But in the case of an error, your ISP's domain-name-service (DNS) did not have an entry for the IP. The number of these errors is almost always very small and not worth worrying about. However, if your ISP does a bad job with their DNS, advanced users might want to switch to OpenDNS.