| Solution: |
Basics
So, there is a basic explanation of the webstats in the help
section from your control panel:
Login -> Help -> Quick Help -> Site Statistics
It's a good idea to read this first.
However, I'll just briefly summarise the important points here:
Pages - the number of
pages that have been viewed.
Visits - the number of
visits made to your website
Referrers - a page from
which someone has comefrom to visit your site, examples of this
would be a link from a search engine search or another website
you are listed on.
Search Strings - the
phrases people have typed in to a search engine that have lead to
them coming to your site.
Also I wanted to point out this excellent (and detailed) summary
of webaliser stats:
http://www.infoserve.com/webalizer.html
(webalizer is the name of the program that generates the stats)
Making Sense Of It All
Daily Useage
If you look at the daily usage table or graph you can quickly get
a sense of how many people are comming to your site and how many
pages they are looking at:
Take note of the Visits (yellow)
and Pages (light blue).
You can also get a rough idea of how many pages people are
looking at
| Quote: | | 1000 Visits with 5000 Pages = average of 5 pages
per person |
Referrers and Searches - Where
are people coming from?
This is valuable information, it gives you a good idea of where
visitors are comming from and what they have searched for. You
should expect to search a mixture of sites that you know are
linking to you, search engines and perhaps some unknown sites
aswell.
In the referrer's table, it lists 'Hits' percentage and the URL..
The Hit's here means the number of requests that have come
directly from that url i.e. the number of times people have come
from that specific page to your site. Also note the percentage,
this tells you how much of your traffic overall has come via this
URL NB it only takes into
account the point of entry into your site, it doesn't record the
traffic generated if someone continues browsing your site.
Therefore, in reality the level of traffic generated from this
link (referrer) is likely to be higher. Also sometimes people's
web browsers do not allow the referrer information to be recorded
so again the real results are probably higher in number (see
inaccuracies below).
The search strings are also very interesting (of course!), this
is what people have searched for (on google etc.) and then come
to your site. Do note however that a certain amount of search
terms will go un noticed (see inaccuracies below).
Sites, Agents and Countries -
Who is comming to my site?
The Sites table gives the hostname of all the visitors to your
website, this is probably mostly made up of hosts you don't know,
but you can expect to see:
search engines like
google, msn and yahoo - these often have the most hits
ISP's like btcentralplus,
demon - this is the ISP of the visitor
Your Self If you visit
your own site a lot, you'll may recognise a hostname from your
ISP that's one of the highest in the table.
If you click on the 'view all sites' button, you'll see all the
individual hostnames that have come to your site for the month -
this gives a sense of the variety of all the visitors.
The Agents table, tell's you the percentage of the type of
browser (or bot) visiting your site. This is a good way to
understand the total number of human visitors.
humans will be:
MSIE x - microsoft
Internet Exploder browsers
Mozilla x - Mozilla
browsers (firefox)
Most of the others will either be rare or some sort of 'bot' i.e.
a search engine.
So in reality the total percentage of the above 2, is the total
percentage of human visitors.
Countries is not so useful, as it's not that accutrate (see
inaccuracies below).
Inaccuracies
Be aware that the webstats cannot give you a 100% accurate
picture (The reasons why are too boring and complicated). So note
the following:
Visits and Sites (hostnames)
Also, just because you have x amount of hosts visiting your web
site, doesn't mean that x amount of people did. The same person
could have visited your web site from three different computers.
Maybe one at work, one at home, and one at school. That will show
up as three hostnames, yet will be only one person. Similarly,
one hostname can represent more than one person. For example, a
computer in a computer lab at an university can be used by
hundreds of students in a single day. If ten of those students
visit your web page it will show as only a single host, because
they all used the same machine.
Missing Referrers -
Sometimes peoples web browsers do not record the referrer
information, perhaps for privicy reasons. So therefore the number
of referrers is likely to be higher than listed.
Missing Searches -
Webaliser attempts to identify referrers that are search engine
queries, but search engines change the way the compose their
URL's so it's difficult for webalizer to keep up and therefore a
certain amount of searches will not be detected.
Countires - This is only
calculated by the tld of the host name, so
| Quote: | |
.co.uk = uk
.com = US
.de = germany
|
However many UK, ISP's use .com rather than .co.uk, so they will
be listed under US.
Anyway I hope this is useful info!
_________________
The
Artists Web
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