Statistics reporting period

At the top of your Live Web Server Statistics report is a set of dates. This will indicate the start and finish of the analysis, and the total number of days included in the reporting period.

General Summary

Looking at the general summary, the headings refer to different parts of your site. Figures in partheses are from the last seven (7) days and the other figure is generally the total for the full analysis period.

Key figures are:

• Successful requests: the number of people who have successfully connected to your site (including all pages, images, sound and video files and whatever else you may have on your site) for a week or monthly period.
• Average successful requests per day: the above figure is for the week or month, however, this figure shows how many people (on average) have visited your site on a daily basis.
• Successful requests for pages: this refers to web pages only rather than all things on your web site (images etc). This can be a more useful measure of traffic to your site, since if your page has 10 images on it this will show as 10 different "hits" or "requests" even though only a single web page was actually requested.
• Successful requests for pages per day: This figure is the same as above but has been averaged out so that you get a daily average.
• Failed requests: Requests that resulted in an error for some reason, most commonly due to a file having been removed or deleted, a URL being typed in incorrectly by one of your site visitors, and so on.
• Redirected requests: A lot of our customers won't need to worry about this but if you have set up redirection within your site (e.g. if you change the directory layout and want to make sure people going to the old page get automatically sent to the new one) then this will report the number of redirects.
• Distinct files requested: refers to the number of different files that have been requested.
• Distinct hosts requested: The number of different hosts/servers that have visited your site. This can be thought of as the number of unique computers looking at your site content. But the actual number can potentially be a lot higher than is reported here: a "host" may be just an individual with a web browser, but it may also be a major ISP with a cache server that will "remember" your page content for a while for better network efficiency. So although they only retrieved your page once they may send it on to their own customers a number of times without needing to re-fetch the entire object from your web site.
• Data transferred: The amount of data that has been transferred from your site throughout the analysed period, generally presented in Megabytes (but may have some other base if your traffic is sufficiently high, e.g. Gigabytes etc).
• Average data transferred: this is a daily average of the information above.

Monthly, Daily, Hourly Reports

These are read all the same way. The width of the bar on the graph will vary depending on the number of hits you are getting and is shown along with the actual number of pages for each day. These reports show how your site traffic is spread across various time periods.

Domain Name Report

This is particularly useful if you wish to view where people that have viewed your site are located around the world. It will not tell you their email address, suburb or state, but it will tell you what country they are browsing from. It does this through the use of the domain name ending eg .au (Australia), .uk (United Kingdom), .us (United States). This can help you if you were thinking of breaking into an overseas market. There could potentially be a market there already for you and many people are pleasantly surprised to see their site getting nibbles of interest from all corners of the globe.

Organisation Report

This will allow you to see what organisation people are using to access your site. For example: A DIALix user may access your site thus showing the ending of dialix.com.au in your statistics. Another example that you are sure to see is: bigpond.net.au for people using Telstra's Big Pond accounts.

Operating System

This information is particularly useful when designing a site or when updating a site. It shows what operating system is the most popular and you can design your site to suit the needs of those people.

Status Code Report

The below example shows the number of requests to your site and whether they were successful, or whether some other status code was generated. Sometimes only partial content is shown, or the document has not been changed since the last time they have visited your site (which often will be the case where an ISP's cache server is checking for updates to your site).

You can also use this information to spot things you can improve on your site. For example, if there are a lot of "404" (Document not found) errors you may need to look at why this is happening and possibly change your document structure to catch some of these misses if necessary. It may be you had a popular page which has been renamed but a of links are still pointing to the old location. You might find it useful to put a redirection page there or make some other arrangement to make sure your visitors find what they are after as easily as possible.

File Size Report

This enables you to view the size of different files and number of requests to these files. Essentially this gives you a guide as to how your traffic is broken down based on the size of the files being requested.

File Type Report

There are many different file types used on the web. This display the different types of files that you are using and the amount of traffic generated by each file type (e.g. HTML, GIF, JPG, MP3, PDF etc). This will allow you to see what type of content is generating the most traffic on your site.

Directory Report

If your content is split across several directories, which is a good idea especially as your site grows in size, you can see which directories are creating the most traffic.

Request Report

Getting into a bit more detail, the Request Report shows the most popular individual files on your site. This is a great way to find out what most people are actually doing on your site. For example you can see whether they are at your prices page, your order page, general info etc.

In short you can hopefully figure out what it is that's really bringing people into your site (and maybe what things they are not so interested in). This can help you understand your visitors and their needs much better and may help in planning your site navigation, which pages you spend your time improving and so on.

Last updated 08 Apr 2005

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