ACS Online's web statistics help webmasters and domain administrators ascertain what types and the amount of traffic that is hitting their websites. Important information can be obtained about who referred the visitor, what pages are visited most, from which countries are most active and daily time periods which are most active, as well as total hits. Using the information displayed by the ACS Online statistical server, administrators can tailor marketing campaigns or report back to management with the numbers.
The First Screen (Yearly Index Table)
The yearly
(index) table shows statistics for a 12 month period, and links to each month.
The monthly report has detailed statistics for that month with additional
links to any URLs and referrers found. The various totals shown are explained
below. Click on the linked month to get the monthly detail screen.
Hits
Any request made to the server which is logged is considered a 'hit'. The requests can be for
anything--html pages, graphic images, audio files, CGI scripts, etc. Each valid line in the server log is counted as a hit.
This number represents the total number of requests that were made to the
server during the specified report period. This means that one person visiting
your site may represent multiple hits on your website.
Files
Some requests made to the server
require that the server then send something back to the requesting client, such
as an HTML page or graphic image. When
this happens, it is considered a 'file' and the files total is incremented.
The relationship between 'hits' and 'files' can be thought of as
'incoming requests' and 'outgoing responses'.
Pages
Pages are, well, pages!
Generally, any HTML document, or anything that generates an HTML
document, would be considered a page. This
does not include the other things that go into a document, such as
graphic images, audio clips, etc. This
number represents the number of 'pages' requested only, and does not include the
other things that are in the page. What
actually constitutes a 'page' can vary from server to server.
The default action is to treat anything with the extension '.htm',
'.html' or '.cgi' as a page. A lot
of sites will
probably define other extensions, such as '.phtml', '.php3' and '.pl' as pages
as well. Some people consider this
number as the number of 'pure' hits. Depending on who you ask, this is not
necessarily correct. Some other programs (and people) refer to this as
'Pageviews'.
Sites
Each request made to the server
comes from a unique 'site', which can be referenced by a name or ultimately, an
IP address. The 'sites' number
shows how many unique IP addresses made requests to the server
during the reporting time period. This
DOES NOT mean the number of unique individual users (real people) that visited,
which is impossible to determine using just logs and the HTTP protocol (however,
this
number might be about as close as you will get).
Visits
Whenever a request is made
to the server from a given IP address (site), the amount of time since a
previous request by the address is calculated (if any). If the time difference is greater than a pre-configured
'visit timeout' value (or has never made a request before), it is considered a
'new visit', and this total is incremented (both for the site, and the IP address). The
default timeout value is 30 minutes (which can be changed), so if a user visits your
site at 1:00 in the afternoon, and then returns at 3:00, two visits would be
registered. Note: in the 'Top Sites' table, the visits total should be
discounted on 'Grouped' records, and thought of as the "Minimum number of
visits" that came from that grouping instead.
Note: Visits only occur on PageType requests, that is, for any request
whose URL is one of the 'page' types defined with the PageType option.
Due to the limitation of the HTTP protocol, log rotations and other
factors, this number should not be taken as absolutely accurate; rather, it should be considered a
fairly close "guess".
KBytes
The KBytes (kilobytes) value shows the amount of data, in KB, that
was sent out by the server during the specified reporting period.
This value is generated directly from the log file, so it is up to the
web server to produce accurate numbers in the logs
(web servers do unusual things when it comes to reporting the
number of bytes). In general, this
should be a fairly accurate representation of the amount of outgoing traffic the
server had, regardless of the web server's reporting quirks. (Note: A kilobyte is
1024 bytes, not 1000.)
Top Entry and Exit Pages
The Top Entry and Exit
tables give a rough estimate of what URLs are used to enter your site and the last pages viewed.
Due to limitations in the HTTP protocol, log
rotations, etc., this number should be considered a "rough guess"
of the actual numbers, but will give you a good indication of the overall trends.
Referrers
The Referrers table shows what page or site referred your web page.
The web server does not actually log the domain name of the referrer, just its IP
address. The web statistics server does a reverse DNS lookup to come up with the
domain name. In some cases, you may still see an IP address only. This is
generally due to the referrer's server not being properly set up for reverse
lookups. The referrer's table can be very helpful in marketing your page. For
instance, if you have submitted your page to a specific trade website and would
like to know whether their link is working, look for their website in the
referrer's table. It will keep track of how often people are referred, shown as
a hit count and as a percentage.
Agents
The Agents table shows what types of computers, operating systems
and web browsers are hitting your site. This could be useful information to your
web designer. Many times your web design can be impacted by certain browsers.
AOL uses a modified version of Internet Explorer and many sites do not look
normal with AOL. If you are getting a decent number of AOL agents on your site,
you should make sure your design looks good.
Countries
The Countries table shows a graph with a pie chart of the number of visitors
from specific countries. The system does not really know where the visitors
originate from, only what domain extensions are being used. Each country has its own
domain extension, e.g., '.us' for the United States, '.de' for Germany or '.ca' for Canada. Some
countries have sold their domain names to private companies who are marketing
the domains to anyone. The '.tv' and '.cc' extensions are both domains that are country codes;
however, they are generally from the United States.