......Technical Support: Interpreting Webalizer Statistics......

Graphical Statistics
Accessing the Statistics
Understanding the Statistics
Configuring the Web Statistics

Graphical Statistics

Your Web Hosting account includes comprehensive graphical statistics that show the number and type of visitors to your website, what website they came from, what part of the world they are from, and more. These reports are generated once a day and are stored in one place so that you can compare statistics easily.

Viewing Your Statistics

To view your statistics, browse to http://www.yourdomain.com/webstats. You will see a webpage with statistics for your domain. If your domain is brand new, you won't see any statistics there yet.

Understanding the Statistics

The first screen you will see shows the monthly statistics for your website. The coloured graphs show the number of pages and files accessed, the overall number of hits, the number of visits and sites, and the number of kilobytes downloaded from your website.

Graphical Monthly Summary

What do the different types of statistics mean?

Pages - The number of web pages accessed by visitors. Pages are specific types of files defined in the configuration file, generally *.htm or *.cgi files. In other words, this statistic excludes graphic files (JPG or GIF files) or other types of files.

Hits - The total number of HTTP requests that the server received during the reporting period. Any request made to the server is considered a hit. This includes pages, graphic files, errors, reloads, etc.

Files - The number of hits that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user, such as an HTML page or image. It does not include missing images, file not found errors, and so on.

Visits - This is an approximation of the number of actual visitors to your website. Webalizer groups all requests from the same IP address within a given period (configured as 30 minutes) and counts them all as one visit. If it gets a request from the same IP address after that 30 minutes has passed, it will count it as a new visit. It is basically an educated guess, as there is no real way (because of the way HTTP works) to tell how many specific visitors are viewing your website.

Sites - The location/dial-up connection of the visitors who have come to your website. This is expressed by a URL or an IP address. When a person dials up through an Internet Service provider (such as AOL, Demon, Virgin Net, Freeserve, CompuServe, etc.) they will be assigned a temporary IP address each time, which Webalizer translates into a URL that can often tell you what Internet provider the visitor was using. The next time the same person dials up to the Internet and visits your site, they may have a different IP address and therefore a different "site".

KBytes - The number of kilobytes downloaded via HTTP from your website to visitors' browsers. This would include web graphics, web pages, files downloaded via HTTP links (not FTP), etc.

Total Hits - A "hit" is a request made by a web browser (i.e. Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator) to the web server. It is usually a request for a file such as a page, a graphic file, etc. When a person visits a web page, each page usually includes a number of files - the html file itself plus any graphic images, animations, or sound files on it. The browser "requests" all of those files from the server. Each of these requests - corresponding to a file - is a "hit." For this reason, the total hits is not a very good indicator of the number of people who visit your site. The number of hits doesn't take into account whether anything was actually delivered in response to the request. For example, the file may not have been there, or may have timed out, etc - but it still counts as a hit.

Total Files - This is the number of files that the server actually delivered to browsers in response to requests (or "hits"). "Files" include html pages, graphics, sound files, etc. Total files will usually be lower than total hits, because sometimes the file requested won't actually be delivered and therefore it will count as a hit but not a file.

Total Visits - This is basically a number extrapolated from the information available. There is no way to actually tell the difference between specific people visiting a website because of the way the HTTP protocol (which the web is based on) works. To get total visits, the Webalizer program takes all the requests that came from a particular IP address within a specified time period (30 minutes is the default) and calls that a "visit"; the assumption is that it's unlikely that two people will be visiting your site at the exact same time from the exact same IP address, so all of those requests probably came from the same person who is browsing your site. Total visits is an approximation, but it is probably a better way to "guess" the number of actual visits to your site than any of the other statistics.

Total Pages - This is merely the number of pages in your site that were delivered to web browsers from the server. Every time someone views a page on your website - an HTML document or a script page (*.CGI) for example - this counts as a page. This number does not include files such as images or sound files that may be included on a page - just the actual number of pages themselves.

Total unique URLS - This is something we're not entirely sure of, but this is what we THINK it is... These are URLs on your website that have been requested by browsers. We think it would count as a unique URL whenever a visitor clicks on a special link generated by a CGI script, which could make the Total Unique URLs number higher than the actual number of HTML pages in your website. It's probably not a very significant statistic - we're not sure why anyone would be interested in it. ;-.

Total unique referrers - This is somewhat interesting because it includes any URL from which a visitor came to your website. For example, if they click on a link on some other site to come to yours, the "referrer" would be that other website with a link to yours. On the other hand, it also could just be when someone is looking at another page and types in your url or goes to your site via their own bookmark, so you could get "referrers" that are totally unrelated. It will include URLs of sites that have links to your page, search engines where people found your site in the search results, etc..

Total unique user agents - A "user agent" is just what computer program was used to browse your site. The vast majority of them will be various versions of Netscape (referred to as Mozilla) or Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE). If you look at the breakdown of user agents further down on the page of statistics, you may see strange ones like "Slurp" or ones that include one of the following words: spider, crawler, or bot. These are usually search engine agents that have spidered your site to index it for a search engine.

Hits by response Code - These are codes that the web server returns to the user's browser in response to a request for a page or file. Most of them are "behind the scenes", as they are just codes passed between the browser and the server in addition to the actual web pages that the user sees. The ones generally seen by a visitor are Code 404 and Code 401, because they happen when the server cannot deliver the requested files to the browser.

Code 200 - OK - This means the server sent the entire file requested by the browser, with no problems..

Code 206 - Partial content - This means the browser didn't receive the entire file - maybe the user hit the "stop" button. It doesn't really indicate a problem.

Code 301 moved permanently and Code 302 Found - These have to do with pages that have been moved or redirected, or the links have changed since the last time the person browsed the site..

Code 304 Not modified - This code is returned when a repeat visitor goes to a page they've looked at before and it is cached in their browser cache.

Code 401 Unauthorized - This happens whenever someone clicks on a link or types in a url of a page or directory that is password restricted, like your Webalizer stats, and fails to give the correct username and password. They get a message saying something like "you are not authorized to view this page..

Code 404 Not Found - This happens when someone types in a url to a page that doesn't exist or mis-types the URL, or a link to page is mis-spelled or the page has been moved or deleted so that the web server can't find the file that the browser is requesting.

Some Examples of the Web Statistics

Below the monthly graphs is a table that shows the same information in numerical format, plus daily averages for each month.

Monthly Summary Statistics Table

You can access more detailed statistics for each month by clicking on the month names on the left side of the table. The detailed statistics include Top Sites, Usage by Country, Top Search Strings, Top User Agents, Top Referrers, Top URLs, and Entry and Exit Pages.

Top Sites

The above tables show the top sites (usually individual visitors or specific locations) ranked by number of hits and by total kilobytes downloaded.

Statistics by Country

The Statistics by Country graph and table show where your website's visitors are from, which is obtained from their site (url) or IP address. Network lumps together all sites ending with .net, which includes ISP's in many countries.

Search Strings

If visitors to your website came via a search engine, this table shows what keywords or phrase they entered in the search engine. This can be useful to see if your website's keywords are effective or not.

User Agents

The User Agents table shows the type of web browsers that have been used by your site's visitors. For many browsers it also shows the version, and can show the total of all versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla (Netscape) if desired.

Top Referrers

This table will show the pages that visitors were viewing before they came to your website. In many cases this will be a search engine or a page that has a link to your site. Sometimes it will show a person's bookmarks or a totally unrelated site, if the visitor merely typed the URL into their browser.

Top URL's

The top URL by hits and KBytes shows the most frequently viewed pages on your website. Other statistics show the pages that visitors most often enter and exit your website on, which can be useful to determine what pages are being linked to from other sites, or what pages are being returned by search engines.