Webpage statistics give you a quick
synopsis of all activities on your website. Most of the information
provided in your statistics reports are related to how frequently people
visit your webpage.
A webpage "hit" is defined as a single attempt to access
your webserver, regardless of whether or not it was successful. All
successful pageviews count as at least one hit. Each image, flash
movie, media clip, or other file included in your webpage also counts
as a hit. This means that a single page with 15 graphics generates
16 "hits" each time it is loaded by a single visitor. When
you see totals and statistics related to "hits", this is
the number of attempts to access your webserver for any given period
of time.
A webpage "file" is a request that actually sent a file
to the user. This gives you the ability to see how many times someone
actually downloaded something from your website. Files will not count
errors (such as 404 Not found errors, covered below), and it will
not count attempts to view your page by caches servers. Cache servers
are computers that proxy requests from a large network and store the
result. Large Internet providers often uses cache services to speed
up Internet access for their customers. Caches download one copy of
a page and then store it for a predetermined period of time. Users
attempting to access your webpage from behind a cache will only show
up as a "File" (IE- they downloaded something from your
website) if it is the first time the cache has visited your webpage,
or if the content has updated. Otherwise the cache simply checks to
see if the file has changed, and if it has not changed it sends back
the locally stored copy instead of the copy from your website.
A webpage "site" is the number of individual computers
that accessed your webpage for a given time period. Each computer
on the Internet receives its own unique number while it is connected
to the Internet (called an IP Address). Sites counts the number of
unique IP addresses that visited your website.
Visits track the number of individual user "browsing sessions"
that occur on your website. If a single user stays on your website
for a given period of time and remains active (IE- he/she is clicking
webpages and reading your webpage) that entire "session"
will count as a visit. If they visit your webpage again after the
session has timed out, they will be counted as a new visit. Visits
only count pages, they do not count images, so users who are linking
to graphics on your webserver will not appear as visitors until they
actually download or view an HTML page.
Response codes are an indication of how the webserver handled your
request. Code requests in the 200 range are successful pageviews,
codes in the 300 range are related to content relocation, or cache
requests to check the validity of stored pages. Only codes in the
400 and 500 range indicate errors on your webserver. 404 errors are
the most common type of error code, and are encountered when you attempt
to access a file that is not on your website. If you are getting a
404 error (Also known as a "Not Found" error), make sure
you typed the filename you wish to link to properly and that you have
uploaded that file to your website.
Additional information about webalizer can be found on the author's
webpage at: http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/webalizer_help.html.
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