All web hosting plans come
with a powerful comprehensive website statistics programme,
that can be used to analyse your website's performance.
Hosting plans will all come with AWStats (pictured)
for free as standard. Some hosting plans also include Webalizer. Both are excellent programmes for analysing who has been
viewing your website.
Statistics are updated daily by the webservers. Below are descriptions what the various statistics terms mean. |
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AW Stats Screenshot
[Click image above to enlarge]
Common
Statistics Terms
| Hits |
Requests by
a person's browser for parts of your website. e.g. if
you have an HTML page
with 2 images, it will be 3 hits. 1 for the page itself
and 2 for the images |
| Files |
Files sent to
the user in response to hits. e.g. if the user's browser
requested the page described above, and the server sent
the HTML and one image,
but then the user clicked stop before the second image
was sent, this would count as 2 Files. |
| Pages |
Page requests only. The
example above would result in a page count of 1. |
| Visits |
Number of unique Visits to
your Website. A user can
have multiple Visits to your site. An example appears
in the indepth description below. |
| Sites |
Number of unique visitors. If a user Visits your site
multiple days in a month, this will count as multiple Visits,
and also as one Site. |
| KBytes |
The amount of traffic your site has done. |
More indepth descriptions from the
Webalizer documentation:
The yearly (index) report shows statistics
for a twelve month period, and links to each month. The monthly
report has detailed statistics
for that month with additional links to any URL's and referrers
found. The various totals shown are explained below.
Hits
Any request made to the server which is logged, is considered
a 'hit'. The requests can be for anything... html pages, graphic
images, audio files, cgi scripts, etc... Each valid line in
the server log is counted as a hit. This number represents
the total number of requests that were made to the server during
the specified report period.
Files
Some requests made to the server, require that the server then
send something back to the requesting client, such as a html
page or graphic image. When this happens, it is considered
a 'file' and the files total is incremented. The relationship
between 'hits' and 'files' can be thought of as 'incoming requests'
and 'outgoing responses'.
Pages
Pages are, well, pages! Generally, any HTML document, or anything
that generates an HTML document, would be considered a page. This
does not include the other stuff that goes into a document, such
as graphic images, audio clips, etc... This number represents
the number of 'pages' requested only, and does not include the
other 'stuff' that is in the page. What actually constitutes
a 'page' can vary from server to server. The default action
is to treat anything with the extension '.htm', '.html' or '.cgi'
as a page. A lot of sites will probably define other extensions,
such as '.phtml', '.php3' and '.pl' as pages as well. Some people
consider this number as the number of 'pure' hits... I'm not
sure if I totaly agree with that viewpoint. Some other programs
(and people :) refer to this as 'Pageviews'.
Visits
Whenever a request is made to the server from a given IP address
(site), the amount of time since a previous request by the
address is calculated (if any). If the time difference is
greater than a pre-configured 'visit timeout' value (or has
never made a request before), it is
considered a 'new visit', and this
total is incremented (both for the site, and the IP address). The
default timeout value is 30 minutes (can be changed), so if
a user visits your site
at 1:00
in the afternoon, and then returns at 3:00, two visits would
be registered. Note: in the 'Top Sites' table, the visits total
should be discounted on 'Grouped' records, and thought of as
the "Minimum number of visits" that came from that grouping instead. Note:
Visits only occur on PageType requests, that is, for any request
whose URL is one of the 'page' types defined with the PageType
option. Due to the limitation of the HTTP protocol, log rotations
and other factors, this number should not be taken as absolutely
accurate, rather, it should be considered a pretty close "guess".
Sites
Each request made to the server comes from a unique 'site',
which can be referenced by a name or ultimately, an IP address. The
'sites' number shows how many unique IP addresses made requests
to the server during the reporting time period. This DOES NOT
mean the
number of unique individual users (real people) that visited,
which is impossible to determine using just logs and the HTTP
protocol (however, this number might be about as close as you
will get).
KBytes
The KBytes (kilobytes) value shows the amount of data, in KB,
which was sent out by the server during the specified reporting
period. This value is generated directly from the log file,
so it is up to the web server to produce accurate numbers in
the logs (some web servers do stupid things when it comes
to reporting the number of bytes). In general, this should
be a fairly accurate representation of the amount of outgoing
traffic the server had, regardless of the web servers reporting
quirks. (Note: A kilobyte is 1024 bytes, not 1000 bytes)
Top Entry and Exit Pages
The Top Entry and Exit Pages give rough estimates of what URL's
are used to enter your site, and what the last pages viewed are.
Because of limitations in the HTTP protocol, log rotations, etc...
This number should be considered a good "rough guess" of the
actual numbers, however will give a good indication of the overall
trend in where users come into, and exit, your site.
Common Definitions
A Site is a remote machine that makes requests
to your server, and is based on the remote machines IP Address/Hostname.
URL - Uniform Resource Locator. All requests
made to a web server need to request something. A URL is
that something, and represents an object somewhere on your
server, that is accessable to the remote user, or results in an
error (ie: 404 - Not found). URLs can be of any type (HTML, Audio,
Graphics, etc...).
Referrers are those URLs that lead
a user to your site or caused the browser to request something
from your server. The vast majority of requests are made from your
own URLs, since most HTML pages contain links to other objects
such as graphics files. If one of your HTML pages contains links
to 10 graphic images, then each request for the HTML page will
produce 10 more hits with the referrer specified as the URL of
your own HTML page.
Search Strings are obtained from examining
the referrer string and looking for known patterns from various
search engines. The search engines and the patterns to look for
can be specified by the user within a configuration file. The default
will catch most of the major ones.
User Agents are a fancy name for browsers.
Netscape, Opera, Konqueror, etc.. are all User Agents, and
each reports itself in a unique way to your server. Keep in mind
however, that many browsers allow the user to change it's
reported name, so you might see some obvious fake names in the
listing.
Entry/Exit pages are those pages that
were the first requested in a visit (Entry), and the last
requested (Exit). These pages are calculated using the Visits logic
above. When a visit is first triggered, the requested page is counted
as an Entry page, and whatever the last requested URL was,
is counted as an Exit page.
Countries are determined based on
the top level domain of the requesting site. This is somewhat
questionable however, as there is no longer strong enforcement
of domains as there was in the past. A .COM domain may reside in
the US, or somewhere else. An .IL domain may actually be in Isreal,
however it may also be located in the US or elsewhere. The most
common domains seen are .COM (US Commercial), .NET (Network), .ORG
(Non-profit Organization) and .EDU (Educational). A large percentage
may also be shown as Unresolved/Unknown, as a fairly large
percentage of dialup and other customer access points do not resolve
to a name and are left as an IP address. Countries that do not
account for many hits to your Website are grouped together as Other in
the pie chart. They are further broken down in the table below
the pie chart. Response Codes are defined as part
of the HTTP/1.1 protocol (RFC
2068; See Chapter 10). These codes are generated by the web
server and indicate the completion status of each request made
to it. |
