How many people actually visit your website each day?
Webalizer Website Traffic Monitoring Statistics
Frequently Asked Questions List
1. What is Webalizer?
2. How can I view my websites traffic stats?
3. What’s the difference between hits, files, pages, visits and referrers?
4.What do Webalizer reports look like?
5. Where does Webalizer get its information from?
6.I want Webalizer monitoring my websites visitor activity but my websites hosted with another provider.
List of Answers to the most Frequently Asked Questions about Webalizer
1. What is Webalizer?
Webalizer produces online detailed website
usage reports in html format, for viewing in any web browser. All client websites hosted with UK Superweb are monitored by Webalizer 24 hours a day 7 days a week providing analysis to assist customers in better understanding their website visitor activity.
Webalizer automatically produces yearly, monthly, daily and hourly statistics. Within the monthly reports, various statistics are produced showing overall website usage, usage by day and hour, usage by visiting sites, URL's, user agents (web browsers), referrers, page and visit totals, entry and exit page totals, search string analysis are the main features.
Each day your websites access logs are read by Webalizer automatically and updated for you to view, each days results are then collated giving you a detailed summary of your websites traffic. This then produces a set of WebPages with your site statistics for viewing.
2. How can I view my websites traffic stats?
Login to your control panel located at http://cp.yourdomain.co.uk, once logged in click logs and then usage statistics.
Here you will find graphical statistics of your websites usage covering a 12-month period logging all traffic on your domain. You can view trffic for any month, click on the month name under 'Summary by Month.'
3. What’s the difference between hits, files, pages, visits and referrers?
These are terms used by Webalizer, and how it defines each. Examination of each statistic provides you with different user information about your website and its visitor traffic.
Hits represent the total number of requests made to the server during the given time period (month, day, hour etc..).
Files represent the total number of hits (requests) that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as 404-Not Found requests and requests for pages that are already in the browsers cache.
Tip: By looking at the difference between hits and files, you can get a rough indication of repeat visitors, as the greater the difference between the two, the more people are requesting pages they already have cached (have viewed already).
Sites is the number of unique IP addresses/hostnames that made requests to the server. Care should be taken when using this metric for anything other than that. Many users can appear to come from a single site, and they can also appear to come from many ip addresses so it should be used simply as a rough gage as to the number of visitors to your server.
Visits occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new Visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non- page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.
Pages are those URLs that would be considered the actual page being requested, and not all of the individual items that make it up (such as graphics and audio clips). Some people call this metric page views or page impressions, and defaults to any URL that has an extension of .htm, .html or .cgi.
A KiloByte (KB) is 1024 bytes (1 Kilobyte). Used to show the amount of data that was transferred between the server and the remote machine, based on the data found in the server log.
A Site is a remote machine that makes requests to your server, and is based on the remote machines IP Address/Hostname.
URL - Uniform Resource Locator. All requests made to a web server need to request something. A URL is that something, and represents an object somewhere on your server, that is accessible to the remote user, or results in an error (i.e.: 404 - Not found). URLs can be of any type (HTML, Audio, Graphics, etc...).
Referrers are those URLs that lead a user to your site or caused the browser to request something from your server. The vast majority of requests are made from your own URLs, since most HTML pages contain links to other objects such as graphics files. If one of your HTML pages contains links to 10 graphic images, then each request for the HTML page will produce 10 more hits with the referrer specified as the URL of your own HTML page.
Search Strings are obtained from examining the referrer string and looking for known patterns from various search engines. The search engines and the patterns to look for can be specified by the user within a configuration file. The default will catch most of the major ones.
Note: Only available if that information is contained in the server logs.
User Agents are a fancy name for browsers. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Netscape, Opera, Konqueror, etc.. are all User Agents, and each reports itself in a unique way to your server. Keep in mind however, that many browsers allow the user to change it's reported name, so you might see some obvious fake names in the listing.
Note: Only available if that information is contained in the server logs.
Entry/Exit pages are those pages that were the first requested in a visit (Entry), and the last requested (Exit). These pages are calculated using the Visits logic above. When a visit is first triggered, the requested page is counted as an Entry page, and whatever the last requested URL was, is counted as an Exit page.
Countries are determined based on the top level domain of the requesting site. This is somewhat questionable however, as there is no longer strong enforcement of domains as there was in the past. A .COM domain may reside in the US, or somewhere else. An .IL domain may actually be in Israel, however it may also be located in the US or elsewhere. The most common domains seen are .COM (US Commercial), .NET (Network), .ORG (Non-profit Organization - NOP) and .EDU (Educational). A large percentage may also be shown as Unresolved/Unknown, as a fairly large percentage of dialup and other customer access points do not resolve to a name and are left as an IP address.
4. What do these Webalizer reports look like?
See the
webalizer reports for a look at the information your presented with when viewing your traffic stats.
5. Where does webalizer get its information?
Straight from the raw web logs that contain a variety of environment variables supplied to us when a browser requests a file from us, including HTTP_REFERRER.
o Source (IP or name)
o Destination domain (E.G uksw.co.uk) timestamp
o HTTP request (normally a 'GET' followed by the URL of the file in question)
o HTTP response code (normally 200 for a success)
o File size (in bytes)
o URL of the referring site (which is where Webalizer gets the search string)
o Whatever the browser identifies itself as (E.G. 'Safari, Firefox, MSIE 7.0; Windows XP)
6. I want Webalizer monitoring my sites visitor activity but my websites hosted with another provider...
UK Superweb can host your website,
web hosting is available from £54.99 + VAT per year, our lowest pricing solution comes with webalizer pre-installed ready to start logging your site visitors. Call us today for free on 0800 169 3266 and we can setup a hosting account for you, we will email you the information required to
upload your website to our servers. Once you site is uploaded you can either point your
nameservers at UK Superweb or
transfer your domain name to us.
If you require help uploading your website no problem we can do it for you, we will handle the step by step process ensuring your website transfer goes smoothly when moving your website to us.
Contact UK Superweb Online Monday to Friday 9am to 6pm by phone on 0800 169 3266. At all other times please use the
contact form.
