USAGE STATISTICS

As an astute business person, you are interested to know your Website's visit statistics.

Every site hosted by Natmark-Concept can access its statistics, as logged by Webalizer (the application installed on our servers). Here are a few tips on how to interpret them.

Look at the big picture

First of all, statistics should always be considered as a whole, and not a single number at a time. If you try to analyse numbers, chances are your findings will be far from the truth.

In fact, wrongly interpreted statistics can cause more harm than good by making you think that all is well when you should worry, and vice-versa. Many things can distort your statistics (like the 50 employees of a big company that share a unique IP address or pages that are cached in a computer or on a server), and numbers themselves are not an accurate indicator of the actual number of visitors.

The accurate tracking of visits takes specialized tools, which are usually not installed (by default) on Web servers. Still, if you track your statistics monthly and treat them as an indicator, you can end up with a pretty good idea of what's going on with your website and what needs to be improved. Good luck!

When you access your logs, you will see them displayed by category:

Daily statistics: Details about daily visits (Hits, Files, Pages, Visits, Sites and KBytes).

Hourly statistics: A monthly compilation of the hours at which your site is visited.

Top URLs: Top 30 and top 10 pages of your website which are most visited.

Top entry pages: Top 10 pages by which your website is entered.

Top exit pages: Top 10 pages by which your website is exited.

Top sites: Top 30 and top 10 sites that visited your website (either by URL or IP address).

Top Referrers: Top 30 referrers (where visitors enter from).

Top search strings: Which top search words visitors find your website with on the search engines.

Top usernames: Identification of who has been accessing your site directly (usually, this section will contain the identity of your webmaster or of people who have to access through special permissions).

Top user agents: Top 15 browser types & systems used during visits.

Usage by countries: Percentage of visitors by country.

Reports: The yearly (index) report shows statistics for a 12 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... The viewing of a single page can include many "hits" and is not a good indicator of the number of visits. 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". 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", ".shtml", ".php3" and ".pl2 as pages as well. Some people consider this number as being the closest to the number of "pure" hits. Then again, some don't... 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, 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, so if a user visits your site at 1:00 in the afternoon, and then returns at 3:00, two visits would be registered.

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. 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 addresses (URL) 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. Furthermore, it will give a good indication of the overall trend in where users come into, and exit, your site.

(Reference: www.webalizer.com)