Solnet provides analysis of your website activity on a monthly basis using the 'analog' program. The program produces many different reports; this page explains the content and meaning of each.
Suggestions for Monitoring
- Monitor 'Successful requests' (hits) on General Summary for trend
- Monitor 'Successful requests for pages' on General Summary for trend
- Monitor 'Distinct hosts served' on General Summary for trend
- Check 'Host Report' to see who your common visitors are
- Check 'Referring Site Report' to see where visitors came from
- Check 'Request Report' to see what your popular pages are.
General Summary
Gives statistics for the month with the last 7 days also shown in brackets.
| Successful requests
| This figure is commonly referred to as 'hits'. Hits or requests count every image, page or PDF file that is requested. Typically a page consists of many images (e.g. navigation buttons & pictures) plus the page text itself. Thus one person opening one page can generate several hits. It is worth monitoring this figure just to check month-by-month activity. If your website is redesigned, this figure may change considerably depending on the graphics used on each page.
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| Average successful requests per day
| Simply the above figure divided by the days in the month
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| Successful requests for pages
| This is the most interesting one. It shows how many real web pages have been viewed in total by all visitors during the month. This figure should definitely be monitored on a month-by-month basis.
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| Average successful requests for page per day
| Again, simply the above figure divided by the days in the month
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| Failed requests
| Request for pages or images that did not exist. Most common reason for this is the absence of a 'robots.txt' file (used to inform search engines to exclude specific pages) or a missing 'favicon.ico' icon file (used when someone bookmarks a page). These 'errors' are not significant. Sometimes failed requests can be due to search engines keeping out of date references. Usually Solnet cater for this situation by redirecting old pages, rather than deleting them. Could also be due to someone keying the wrong address into the browser or a link from another website being spelt incorrectly. Another common reason is a missing page or graphic. Solnet can investigate failed requests if required.
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| Redirected requests
| Some pages include automatic redirects to another page.
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| Distinct Files Requested
| This figure shows the total number of different pages and images that were requested during the month. Not particularly significant.
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| Distinct hosts served
| This figure is a reasonable indication of the number of visitors to the website. Because many users often share the same connection, it is impossible to give a true figure of actual people. Our experience shows that this figure plus another 30% is about right to give the real number of visitors.
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| Corrupt Logfile lines
| A low count here is not significant, however a high count may be an indication of system problems at Solnet.
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| Data Transferred
| Commonly referred to as 'bandwidth'. This give the total amount of data (graphics and text) sent from the website to users during the month.
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| Average Data Transferred per day
| Again, simply the above figure divided by the days in the month
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Weekly, Daily, Hourly Reports & Hourly Summary
These reports are not particularly significant. They give graphical indications of website activity based on time periods. The Weekly summary shows busy/quiet weeks, bear in mind the first and last week may not have 7 days. The Daily Report shows the busy/quiet days during the month. The hourly summary can be interesting as it shows the peak periods of activity during an average day.
Host Report
This shows the most common users of your website. Usually the top ones are search engines or ISP proxy servers. As the report shows the IP address it is difficult to tell who the users actually are, but you can click here to check an IP address. It is worth checking the top five or so just to see who's looking at your website.
Referrer & Referring Site Reports
This shows what pages and sites generated hits to your website. Remember that a hit is text or a graphic. Normally your own website will be top of the list, this is because after users arrive at your website, each page they view calls for images or more pages from the website. If you ignore your own website, the other statistics show where visitors to your website came from. The summary is most useful to analyse 'hits' from search engines.
Search Query & Search Word Reports
This shows the terms and words used by people in search engines that located your website.
Browser Report, Browser Summary & Operating System Report
These reports are not particularly interesting. They show the PC setup of visitors to your website. No surprise that the majority are MSIE (Internet Explorer) with Windows Operating System.
Status Code Report
When a request is made for an image or text, the web server usually sends it to the browser together with a code indicating everything was ok (200 = Success). Sometimes requests generate errors or other codes. They are shown here. Normally you don't need to worry about a small number of other status codes. The most common other status is 304 Not Modified, which tells the browser to use it's cached version of the text or graphic.
File Size, File Type & Directory Report
Shows the type and size of files being requested. Common types are gif/jpg for images, html/ihtml/asp for pages, swf for Flash graphics and pdf for Adobe PDF files. The directory report shows requests for files in sub folders of your website (often image folders).
Request Report
This is a significant report as you can see what pages in your website are most commonly viewed. A single slash (/) indicates the home page. Look for files with html/ihtml or asp in the name. Filetypes such as gif or jpg are most commonly navigation buttons when near the top of the list. Another popular file is usually 'style.txt' or 'style.css' or similar, which is the font style sheet for the website.
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