Web Sites and Ezine Design and Hosting
Analysis of Site Visitor Stats
Web site visitor Stats generally report on the number of visitors that are viewing your site. WebValence supports several different Web Site Stats analysis programs, which are linked below.- Analog - provides daily report of visitors for each page, segregated by month. Includes pie charts for ease of interpretation. Widely used.
- AWStats - provides daily, weekly and monthly report of visitors, including barchart comparison of past months. AWStats is open source GNU software.
- Funnel Web Analyzer -Stats analysis provides more detailed and graphically rich reports of visitors for each page, organized by month. Includes analysis of the activity of an individual visitors.
When your site was initialized, the analysis program was set to the default Analysis program, which is Analog. For more advanced stats reporting see AWStats and Funnel Web Analyzer.
Contact support if you want to use a different stats analysis program.
Accessing Site Visitor Stats
Regardless of the Stats Analysis program in use at your site, your access is via the site console, which is located at:http://your_site_name/console/
User Name = FirstLastName (Your first and last name, all lower case, no spaces)
Password = Your_Password (Your standard WebValence password)
Help with Standard Analog Stats Reports
Your visitors report is generated by a widely used program called Analog from Steven Turner at the University of Cambridge. We use it as the default because it runs very fast and provides useful information with minimum overhead.
Definitions: Hosts, Requests, Pages and kBytes
Analog reporting uses the following definitions.- host is the computer which has asked for a file from your Web Site. The file might be a page (an HTML document) or it might be an image or a script. The computer might be making the request for a single user, or might be a search engine making a request for the purpose of cataloging your Web Site.
- #reqs (number of requests) counts all the files which have been requested, including pages, graphics, and so forth. This number is deceptively high, since each page of your Web Site may have several files associated with it.
- pages counts HTML pages only and is the most useful indicator of how much traffic your Web Site is receiving.
- referrer is a Web Site page where your visitor was hyperlinked (referred) to a page in your Web Site. If the visitor followed a hyperlink on a page in your Web Site to reach another page in your Web Site, the referrer will be a page in your Web Site.
- kBytes is the aggregate of the size of all the requests in thousands of bytes. This is an indicator of the load that your Web Site is placing on the webserver's communication channel.
| Tip: here's the summary from a typical report. Pay attention only to the successful requests for pages (in red) numbers for the most useful idea of average number of visits per day during the past 7 days.
General Summary (Go To: Top: General Summary: Daily Summary: Hourly Summary: Request Report: Failure Report: Referrer Report: Referring Site Report: Failed Referrer Report: Browser Summary) (Figures in parentheses refer to the last 7 days).
Note that the number of failed requests (in blue) seems a little high. This probably means that there are one or more broken links on the web site. Check the failure report to find out if that is correct. |
More: Successful, Redirected, and Failed Requests
Analog summarizes the status of the requests according to whether the webserver was able to satisfy the request or not. The following terminology is used:- Successful requests indicate the webserver found and returned (served) the requested file.
- Failed requests indicate that the webserver could not find the requested file, or the file was password protected.
- Redirected requests indicate that the webserver redirected the request to another file. The most common cause of these requests is that the user has incorrectly requested a directory name without the trailing slash. The other common cause of redirected requests is their use as "click-thru" advertising banners.
- Corrupt logfile lines are lines that Analog could not interpret.
More on Interpreting the STATS Reports
The figures in parentheses in the General Summary Report are for the last seven days. The figures for the last seven days are not included if all, or none, of the requests fall in the last seven days.In the Domain Report, "domain not given" means that the host name did not contain a dot. "Unknown domain" means that it did contain a dot, but that the domain name was not in the domains file.
Using the Stats Reports
We recommend that you review the status reports once a week. It may help you correlate increases in visits with your marketing activities. You will probably see an increase in visits on the day following media coverage, or mention a Web Site feature in your newsletter.Pay particular attention to the pattern of visits to your pages. Your home page may receive far more visits than any of your other pages. If so, you might want to devise a strategy to either encourage more people to visit other pages, or bring more of your crucial content forward to the home page.
Also notice who is referring to your Web Site. You might conclude that you need a campaign to create more referring pages at search engines, registries, and othe sites on the web.
Glance at your error report to see whether there are any obvious broken links or erroneous references cataloged in a search engine somewhere.
STATS Reporting and What You CAN Learn
The following is abstracted from the user guide to Analog. (The author of the Analog program takes a conservative approach to interpreting webserver log data.)From your report, you can learn
- the number of requests made to your Web Site
- when they were made
- which files or pages were requested
- which host asked you for them.
You can also know what people told you their browsers were, and what the referring pages were. (A referring page is a page that links to your Web Site.) Be advised that some browsers lie about their identity and their referring page.
From the information above, you can get an idea of the number of visitors to your site, and some of the ways that they are finding you. You can also see learn of possibly missing files and incorrect hyper links.
STATS Reporting and What You CAN'T Learn
You can't learn the following from Analog or any other program (according to the author of Analog).- The identity of your visitors, or their Email addresses
- How many visitors you have had. (You can make an approximation of this by looking at the number of distinct hosts that were served.)
- How many discrete visits you have had. (You can make an approximation by considering the amount of time that elapses between requests from a given host.)
- The path that a given user took through your Web Site.
- How the visitors left your Web Site and where they went.
- How long people spent reading each of your pages.
As mentioned above, some of these items can be deduced to an approximation (Marty's notes).
