Hi all, Quick "noob" kinda question. RE: Webalizer Stats I am volunteering some time for a community non-profit website... http://www.sackvillenovascotia.ca Our group needs to clarify something with respect to our stats (As plain language as you can please) What does each of these mean? VISITS = 2189 PAGES = 9,468 FILES = 30,054 HITS = 40, 345 February 2005 I guess one of the things we want to know is: How many UNIQUE visitors did we have? Different IPs? Also, is there a "relationship" between VISITS & HITS? Thank you A LOT, Mike
There should be something indicating unique visitors, rather than just visits. As to your other question: Many folks confuse hits with actual visitors. Hits are NOT a good indicator of how many actual visitors you are receiving. You need to know exactly how many visitors you are receiving, how many of those are unique visitors, and of course how many pages they are viewing while visiting. Define: hit As used in reference to the World Wide Web, hit means a single request from a web browser for a single item from a web server; thus in order for a web browser to display a page that contains 3 graphics, 4 hits would occur at the server: 1 for the HTML page, and one for each of the 3 graphics. Hits are often used as a very rough measure of load on a server, e.g. Our server has been getting 300,000 hits per month. Because each hit can represent anything from a request for a tiny document (or even a request for a missing document) all the way to a request that requires some significant extra processing (such as a complex search request), the actual load on a machine from 1 hit is almost impossible to define. cpmcnet.columbia.edu/computers/html/glossary.html
That HELPS. Thanks. Yes, there is an IP "section," we were just curious about which "category" gives us the best idea of visitors to the site. Mike
A visit is a series of consequitive HTTP requests (hits) from the same visitor (IP address). Each request in a visit is within 30 minutes (may be different) from the previous and the following requests. A page is an HTTP request for a resource of such types as HTML, PHP, ASP, etc. Images, scripts and stylesheets are not considered as pages. Files are successful HTTP requests. So, if a request resulted in a 404 (file not found), it will not be counted as a file. All hits, successful and not successful. Many people confuse visitors and visits. A visitor (identified by an IP address) sends requests to a website, forming visits, as described above. A single visitor may visit your website twice and you will have one visitor and two visits. J.D.
If you are able to, check out AWStats. It provides a breakdown of unique visitors, total visits, pages viewed, hits recorded, bandwidth, plus a plethora of other noteworthy data. I've also found it is much easier to make sense of the reports than with Webalizer.
Im using AWstats, it is probably one of the best statistics on the net, it has break down for each hit to which country your visit is coming from, plus it shows you all the pages that are visited and how many times they were visited. If you want to see the break down go to http://awstats.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl all though my stats were not impressive
It is never a good idea to disclose your stats as it reveals too many details about the structure of your website. You should protect these pages and not allow anybody to view them without proper authorization. I would advise you to edit your post and replace your URL with this: http://awstats.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/awstats.pl J.D.