About Your Activity Report
EyeMAC can provide you with a statistical report that details the activity on your web site. This document will explain the various sections of the report so that you can make better use of the information.
There are two important and potentially misleading terms used throughout the report:
- Request ("Hit")
- Each time someone requests a document (clicks on a link to your site
or within your site) counts as one request. Text (HTML), graphics, sounds,
and form submissions each count as a request. What we think of as one web
page might count as five requests, for example, if it is a text file with
four embedded graphics.
A few things to keep in mind about requests:
- Some people turn graphics off in their web browser to save download time. So when they retrieve a page with embedded graphics, only one request will be recorded. (Some ancient web browsers don't even support graphics!)
- Number of requests does not equal number of visitors. Each visitor may generate only one or as many as hundreds of requests.
- If you use the same graphic on multiple pages, each will count as a request, even though the file does not have to be re-transmitted.
- Selecting a link within your site that connects to a document at another site does not count as a request.
- Host
- Each computer that requests files from your site is a host. Every host
on the Internet has a number (Its IP number) and most have names that help
describe who owns them.
Some things to know about hosts:
- Host names are hierarchical from right to left. For example, EyeMAC's web server is named www.eyemac.com, which means it is part of the Com domain (in which all Commercial providers live), part of EyeMAC Development, and its name is www.
- Not all hosts have names. If there's no name associated with a host, only its number will appear in the log.
- Number of hosts does not equal number of visitors. Some hosts may have many, even millions of users! Users of commercial on-line services such as America Online all count as one host.
The rest of this document explains each of the sections of your report. Each section has a small snippet from an actual report to demonstrate. As always, if you have any questions, let us know!
General Statistics
This section describes overall information about the activity for the month.
Daily Report
This section shows the total number of requests on each day of the reporting period. Weeks are separated by blank lines to make it easier to read.
Hourly Summary
This section shows the distribution of requests throughout the hours of the day. Rember that it's always daytime somewhere, so those 4am visitors aren't just insomniacs!
Domain Report
This section shows the "top-level domains" of visitors to your site. The top level domain indicates the geographic area or business sector of the visitor. This information gives you an overall picture of where your visitors are located geographically. The top level domain is part of the host computer's name. "Unresolved Numerical Addresses" are requests from computers that do not have names, only numbers.
Host Report
This section shows the actual hosts (computers) that have requested files from your site, in order by number of requests. This section shows you who your "top visitors" are. Only the top 40 requesting hosts are shown; beyond that it isn't very interesting.
Directory Report
This section shows the requests for your site divided by directory name. Directories are usually used to divide up major sections of a site. Not all sites have more than one directory, so this may not be interesting for you. The "cgi" directory shows form submissions (such as guestbook entries).
Request Report
- Only text files are shown here, not graphics, so the numbers won't add up to the total number of requests.
- / represents the home page.
- Every file that was requested at least once is listed here.
- Note that requests for the home page don't necessarily equal the number of visitors to your site. One person might visit the home page several times, or never, while perusing your site.
Now we're down to the really interesting part. This section shows each text (HTML) file on your site, in order by number of requests. Since the filenames aren't always obvious, you can click the links to jump to the actual page to see what it is.
Referer Report
This section shows the page a visitor was looking at before they went to your site. Pages that are not search results are also clickable links, so you can jump to the page to see if there's actually a link to your site.
A few notes about referrals:
- Not all browsers report the referring page, so there won't be as many referers as requests.
- Referers within your own site aren't listed.
- There might not be a link to your site on a referring page. Someone might have typed your address, or used a bookmark. In that case, the referer just shows the last page the person was looking at; it doesn't necessarily relate to your site at all.
- If the referer is a search engine, you can sometimes decode the search parameters that were used to find you.
Browser Report
This section shows the Web browser program used by visitors to your site. This information can be useful when deciding whether to used advanced layout features, such as backgrounds and tables, that are supported only by better browsers like Netscape, Mosaic, and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Some of the browsers you will see in this list are automatic "robots" that scan and index the site. Lynx is a text-only browser (users of Lynx see no graphics at all!).
Program Credits
This section shows the original author of the statistics program and the computer time it took to generate the report. Not very interesting!
