The "Summary by Month" report shows statistics for a 12 Month period, and links to each month. The monthly reports have detailed statistics for each month with additional links to the viewed web pages and search engine referral queries. The various totals shown are explained below.

Hits

Any request made to the server which is logged, is considered a 'hit'. The requests can be for anything... html pages, graphical 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 and can be quite large relative to the actual pages and visits.

Files

Some requests made to your website, require that the web server send something back to the visitor, such as an html page or graphical image. When this happens, it is considered a file and the total files number 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 files that go into an HTML document, such as graphical images, audio clips, etc... This number represents the number of pages requested only, and does not include the other "stuff" that is in the page. What actually constitutes a "page" is anything with the file name extension ".html", ".htm", ".php" or ".jsp". Some people consider this number to be the number of actual hits ... while others (and some automated programs) refer to this as Pageviews.

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 visitor's address is calculated (if any). If the time difference is greater than 30 minutes, it is considered a new visit, and this total is incremented (both for the site, and the visiting IP address).

As an example: if an user visits your site at 1:00 in the afternoon, and then returns at 3:00, two visits would be registered. It should be noted that due to limitations of the Internet HTTP protocol, log rotations and other factors, this number should not be taken as absolutely accurate, rather, it should be considered a pretty close estimate.

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 total sites number in your report shows how many unique IP addresses made requests to your website during the reporting time period. This does not mean the number of unique individual users (real people) that visited your website. This is impossible to completely calculate due to user concealment behind routers and proxy servers. However, this number should generally be considered accurate.

KBytes

The KBytes (kilobytes) value shows the amount of data, in KB, which was sent out for your website during the specified reporting period. In general, this should be a fairly accurate representation of the amount of outgoing traffic for your website. (Note: A kilobyte is 1024 bytes, not 1000 bytes)

Top Entry and Exit Pages

The Top Entry and Exit Pages will give you a rough estimate of the most popular web pages where visitors are entering your site, and the last pages they are viewing before they choose to leave. Because of limitations in the HTTP protocol, log rotations, etc, this number should be considered a good rough estimate, however, this will give you a good indication of the overall trend of user entry and exit to and from your website.

If you have additional questions regarding your website statistics, please contact Williamson Software. We are here to assist you.

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