Web Statistics
Use our Web Stats to monitor your traffic, and search engine optimisation success. See which other websites are giving hits to your website, which search engines are working, and which keywords people have used to find you. Web Stats come free with every domain you register and host with us.
IMPORTANT NOTES
We do not control who can or cannot visit your website. We also cannot control who links to your website. AWStats will report all of these links, and there is nothing we can do if a link to your website exists on an unfavourable page. Unique visitors can come from all sorts of sources, and you will see some information within your statistics report as to what hosts or sources these visitors are using. AWStats may report unsuccessful malicious activity, and we cannot tell AWStats not to report these. Unsuccessful malicious attacks are nothing to be concerned with, and only shows that our security system is doing its job.
Here is an explanation of the terms you will find as provided by http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/awstats_glossary.html
Unique Visitor:
A unique visitor is a host that has made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your web site during the current period shown by the report. If this host make several visits during this period, it is counted only once.
The period shown by AWStats reports is by default the current month.
However if you use AWStats as a CGI you can click on the "year" link to have a report for all the year. In a such report, period is full year, so Unique Visitors are number of hosts that have made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your web site during those year.
Visits:
Number of visits made by all visitors.
Think "session" here, say a unique IP accesses a page, and then requests three others without an hour between any of the requests, all of the "pages" are included in the visit, therefore you should expect multiple pages per visit and multiple visits per unique visitor (assuming that some of the unique IPs are logged with more than an hour between requests)
Pages:
The number of "pages" logged. Only files that don't match an entry in the NotPageList config parameter (and match an entry of OnlyFiles config parameter if used) are counted as "Pages". Usually pages are reserved for HTML files or CGI files, not images nor other files requested as a result of loading a "Page" (like js,css... files).
Hits:
Any files requested from the server (including files that are "Pages") except those that match the SkipFiles config parameter.
Bandwidth:
Total number of bytes for pages, images and files downloaded by web browsing.
Note 1: Of course, this number includes only traffic for web only (or mail only, or ftp only depending on value of LogType).
Note 2: This number does not include technical header data size used inside the HTTP or HTTPS protocol or by protocols at a lower level (TCP, IP...).
Because of two previous notes, this number is often lower than bandwith reported by your provider (your provider counts in most cases bandwitdh at a lower level and includes all IP and UDP traffic).
Entry Page:
First page viewed by a visitor during its visit.
Note: When a visit started at end of month to end at beginning of next month, you might have an Entry page for the month report and no Exit pages.
That's why Entry pages can be different than Exit pages.
Exit Page:
Last page viewed by a visitor during its visit.
Note: When a visit started at end of month to end at beginning of next month, you might have an Entry page for the month report and no Exit pages.
That's why Entry pages can be different than Exit pages.
Session Duration:
The time a visitor spent on your site for each visit.
Some Visits durations are 'unknown' because they can't always be calculated. This is the major reason for this:
- Visit was not finished when 'update' occured.
- Visit started the last hour (after 23:00) of the last day of a month (A technical reason prevents AWStats from calculating duration of such sessions).
Please note, it is common for sites with a lot of traffic generated from search engines to have 50-60% of customers leaving in under 30 seconds. The important thing is how long those other 40% stick around for, and just how many they are as a number, not as a percentage... Its something to watch and monitor...
Grabber:
A browser that is used primarily for copying locally an entire site. These include for example "teleport", "webcapture", "webcopier"...
Direct access / Bookmark:
This number represent the number of hits or ratio of hits when a visit to your site comes from a direct access. This means the first page of your web site was called:
- By typing your URL on the web browser address bar
- By clicking on your URL stored by a visitor inside its favorites
- By clicking on your URL found everywhere but not another internet web pages (a link in a document, an application, etc...)
- Clicking an URL of your site inside a mail is often counted here.
Add To Favourites:
This value, available in the "miscellanous chart", reports an estimated indicator that can be used to have an idea of the number of times a visitor has added your web site into its favourite bookmarks.
The technical rules for that is the following formula:
Number of Add to Favourites = round((x+y) / r)
where
x = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/anydir/favicon.ico", with a referer field not defined, and with no 404 error code
y = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/favicon.ico", with a referer field not defined, with or without 404 error code
r = Ratio of hits made by IE browsers compared to hits made by all browsers (r <= 1)
As you can see in formula, only IE is used to count reliable "add", the "Add to favourites" for other browsers are estimated using ratio of other browsers usage compared to ratio of IE usage. The reason is that only IE do a hit on favicon.ico nearly ONLY when a user add the page to its favourites. The other browsers make often hits on this file also for other reasons so we can't count one "hit" as one "add" since it might be a hit for another reason.
AWStats differentiate also hits with error and not to avoid counting multiple hits made recursively in upper path when favicon.ico file is not found in deeper directory of path.
Note that this number is just an indicator that is in most case higher than true value. The reason is that even IE browser sometimes make hit on favicon without an "Add to favourites" action by a user.
HTTP Status Codes:
HTTP status codes are returned by web servers to indicate the status of a request. Codes 200 and 304 are used to tell the browser the page can be viewed. All other codes generates hits and traffic 'not seen' by the visitor. For example a return code 301 or 302 will tell the browser to ask another page. The browser will do another hit and should finaly receive the page with a return code 200 and 304. All codes that are 'unseen' traffic are isolated by AWStats in the HTTP Status report chart, enabled by the directives ShowHTTPErrorsStats. in config file. You can also change value for 'not error' hits (set by default to 200 and 304 with the ValidHTTPcodes directive. The following table outlines all status codes defined for the HTTP/1.1 draft specification outlined in IETF rfc 2068.
They are 3-digit codes where the first digit of this code identifies the class of the status code and the remaining 2 digits correspond to the specific condition within the response class. They are classified in 5 categories:
SMTP Status Codes:
SMTP status codes are returned by mail servers to indicate the status of a sending/receiving mail. The status code depends on mail server and preprocessor used to analyze log file.
All codes that are failure codes are isolated by AWStats in the SMTP Status report chart, enabled by the directives ShowSMTPErrorsStats in AWStats config file. You can decide which codes are successfull mail transfer that should not appear in this chart with the ValidSMTPCodes directive.
Here are values reported for most mail servers (This should also be values when mail log file is preprocessing with maillogconvert.pl).
SMTP Errors are classified in 3 categories:
| 2xx/3xx class - Success They are SMTP protocols successfull answers
Those codes are temporary error message. They are used to tell client sender that an error occured but he can try to solve it but trying again, so in most cases, clients that receive such codes will keep the mail in their queue and will try again later.
This are permanent error codes. Mail transfer is definitly a failure. No other try will be done.
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Summary
The first selection we have will be the summary section. In this section everything contained within the page is summed up into a few simple to read sections. This section will give a user the basic run down for the month as far as stats go. More useful information can be found further down.
Unique Visitors
The unique visitors section of the summary page will show the amount of “Unique” or different visitors to a page. This is normally the amount asked for by other webmasters. This is a true number of visitors to a site for the current month.
Number of Visits
The number of visits is the amount of users that come to the site including return visitors. This is the amount of unique visitors combined with return visits. So if a user visits a page more then once in a 12 hour period, each of those visits will be counted and displayed here.
Pages
The pages section displays the amount of pages that have been viewed for the month. This basically shows the amount of pages within a site that have been viewed by users throughout the month.
Hits
Hits are the amount of visits a site receives plus the amount of connections per user. Each user that displays a web page may make multiple connections to the server to download images, text and any other information that may be needed for the page to display. This is all logged and is displayed as the amount of total hits a site receives.
Bandwidth
The bandwidth displays the current bandwidth usage for the month. It also displays the average usage per user. This is the average amount of bandwidth a user may use each visit. This will give a good idea of what the bandwidth usage is like for the month and give a basis for calculating the monthly bandwidth usage.
Monthly History
The monthly history displays pasts months the same way the Summary displays the current month. This will give a short run down of the; unique visitors, number of visits, page views, hits, and bandwidth. Each section is the same as above, with more months to view.
Days of Month
The days of the month displays each day of the month and the usage statistics for that day. This information will give a user stats for; number of visits, pages, hits, and bandwidth. This information reads the same way all of the above does.
The bottom of this section will give an average and a total. The average is the site averages in; number of visits, pages, hits and bandwidth each day. The total is the same but the total so far for that month. This information can be found under the Summary section also.
Days of Week
The days of the week displays average stats for each day of the week. This will give a user information on each day and which days out perform others. This is good information for users that release information on a weekly basis. By releasing information or updates on the most popular day of each week, more viewers will see the new information.
Hours
The hour section displays the totals for each hour of the day for that month. This will give useful information to a user about which hour of the day users’ login more often.
Hosts
The hosts section displays the top 25 hosts that have visited the site. These are normally users, but in some cases can be search engines and other spidering programs. This section will also display the last time a user visited the site. This will only give the host IP address.
Authenticated Users
Authenticated users are those that have access to password protected sections of a site. Any section using an .htaccess file to password protect it will be displayed in this section. This lets a webmaster know if someone has access to the site that shouldn’t have. There is also a “Last Visit” section on this, which will display the last time that user accessed the site.
Robots/Spiders Visitors
Robots or Spiders are used by search engines to index a site and the pages within it. This section will display a list of robots/spiders that have hit a site along with the hits and bandwidth for each. It also lists the last time the robot/spider hit the site. This information is very useful for SEO (Search Engine Optimists). This also lets a user know which major search engines haven’t hit their site, so they can submit to them.
Visits Duration
The visits duration will display the average amount of time users stay on the site. This is useful to find out if users are actually staying on the site and using the information provided, or just looking over the site and then leaving. This section will display the number of visits for each time duration, along with the percentage of traffic it makes up. Each time duration is measured in minutes; there is also an hour+.
Please note, it is common for sites with a lot of traffic generated from search engines to have 50-60% of customers leaving in under 30 seconds. The important thing is how long those other 40% stick around for, and just how many they are as a number, not as a percentage... Its something to watch and monitor...
Files Types
This section shows the different types of files that are access on the server. It will show the hits the file type received along with it’s percentage of the traffic. This will also show the amount of bandwidth this type of file consumes and the percentage it uses of the total bandwidth used for that month. This is a good section to find out what files are using the most bandwidth.
Page-URL
Each time a user visits a page within a site, the system will log where they have went on the server. So if a users’ hit the index file the most, it will be displayed as number one on this section. This also displays more useful information like “Viewed” and “Average Size”. Viewed is the amount of times users have accessed this file total, average size is the average size of the file. Remember that dynamically created pages will not be displayed here, only the handler file.
The Entry and Exit section is can also be very useful. For those of us that practice SEO (Search Engine Optimization) this section is gold. The “Entry” section shows how many users enter the site on that given page compared to the total “Viewed” number. This number is how many users have loaded that page first. The “Exit” section is the same thing, but it shows how many users exited the site from that given page.
Operating Systems
The operating systems section is just how it sounds. It will display different operating systems and the amount of users that use them. This section also shows the amount of hits and the percentage of traffic that given operating system makes up. This is helpful in determining how many users can view the site the way it was meant to be viewed. Each browser for each operating system will display the site differently. So if the site was optimized for Internet Explorer (Windows) then someone using Konqueror (Linux) will view it differently.
Browsers
Just as the operating systems section, this displays the browsers users use to view a site with. This will also show the amount of users that have hit the site and the percentage of traffic they make up. This is also good in determining which users are viewing the site the way it was meant to be viewed. This will also show which users can’t view the site at all, if a given browser will not load a page correctly.
Grabber
The grabber section of the “Browsers” section will give a simple yes or no. This means that the browser or program is copying or grabbing the files for later use. Allot of offline browsers will do this in order to view a page correctly while being offline. The most common grabber that will be displayed here will be WebCopier. WebCopier is an offline browser that will download an entire site for offline viewing.
Connect to Site From
The “connect to site from” section is one of the most important sections of the stats log. This section will give a wealth of knowledge if read correctly. Keep in mind this section gives “Pages” which is explained above as how many page views a site receives. It also has “Hits” which is also explained above as how many visits + return visits a site receives. The percentage of traffic each section makes up for is also displayed.
Direct Address/Bookmark
The Direct address/book section is just how it sounds. It will display the amount of users that have visited a site from their own bookmarks or have typed the address in directly through their browsers. These are your return visitors, your community and what makes up for the majority of the traffic to a users site.
Links from News Group
Links from News Group are links from news groups. This will display the amount of links from any news groups directly to the site or its sub pages.
Links from Internet Search Engine
This is one of the most important sections of a users log file. If a user practices SEO (Search Engine Optimization) then this will be very helpful in determining which search engines are linking to their site and the amount of traffic that is being generated from that given search engine. The two rows of numbers beside each engine are the page views and hits that have been received from that search engine. A link to a full list is also available if all are not listed.
Links from an External Page
This section is setup the same as the links from Internet search engines. It will list links from other sites instead of search engines. This could be a sites affiliates’, anyone linking to a users site, or anything other then search engines. This also gives the page views and hits along the side of each link. This section will also display the total page views and hits along with there percentages.
Search Keyphrases and Keywords
This is the most important section of the log files, if SEO is practiced. This search keyphrases will display key phrases that users have used to access the site. These are not single keywords; the keywords section will display those. Again each section will display the amount of searches that each key word of phrase quarried along with the percentage of traffic it accounts for.
Miscellaneous
This section displays miscellaneous information about a site. The most important of this section, is the amount of users that have bookmarked the site. Most webmasters use this as a kind of popularity ranker. The more bookmarks verses users for that month, means they are doing something right. The first number is always the amount that accrued and the second is the amount of visits.
HTTP Error Codes
The HTTP error code section displays different errors that have accrued for visitors to the site. This section also displays the amount of hits each error received along with it’s percentage of traffic it accounts for. Also shown here is the amount of bandwidth each error account for.
Conclusion
Log files are simple to read once a basic knowledge of them is acquired. Learning to utilize log files and statistic analyzers are an important part of running any site. They will give very useful information about a number of different aspects of a site, as can been seen from the above. They are a vital role in any websites growth and development.
(Text provided by http://www.webmasterstop.com