We generate statistical reports for hosted sites on a calendar month basis.
Enclosed please find the most recent Web Server Statistics Report on your web site. This guide will help you to make sense of the data for your site. If, after reviewing the report, you have any specific questions please feel free to call Michael Fryd at (305) 673-5200 for a further explanation.
Browser
A program used for looking at web pages. The most popular browsers are Netscape Navigator, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
"Total Requests" or "Hits"
The term "Hit" and the term "Request " mean the same thing, and are used interchangeably. One hit (or request) is registered every time someone accesses an element on your site. Elements include the page itself, and also each graphic, logo, or form submission.
If your home page has four graphics on it, then someone looking at that page will generate five hits, one for the page, and one for each of the graphics. Typically, browsers remember recently viewed elements, so graphics which appear on multiple pages will only generate hits on the first page on which they appear.
Requests for Pages
The number of "page views" for you site. This is simply the count of those hits that were actually for pages. Hits for graphics are not included in this total. If a person visits your home page, and two other product pages, it would count as three requests for pages. If the user then returns to your home page, it typically would not be counted as the browser would probably still have a copy of your home page, and would not need to retrieve it again.
Host
The machine from which a request comes. The machine may be an individual's computer serving one person or it can be a gateway from a large corporation or an on-line service serving tens or thousands of people. Gateway machines (sometimes called proxy servers) may retrieve a page once from your site and send it on to tens or thousands of people without reporting back to us again.
Byte
Standard measurement of data, roughly equal to the amount of storage needed to hold a single character of text.
kbyte=kilobyte=approximately a thousand bytes.
mbyte=megabyte=approximately a million bytes, or a thousand kilobytes.
Banner Ad
An advertisement which runs as a "banner" at the top of the page. We run banner ads on our Joke Server. Banner ads are usually hyper-linked to a web site for the advertised product. People can click on a banner ad to go directly to the advertised site.
Click-throughs
When a visitor clicks on a banner ad and goes to the advertised site, he is said to have "Clicked-through" the ad.
Our standard report covers all traffic during a single calendar month. Your report runs from the first hit you received in the month until the last. This is usually a little less than the full month.
Total successful requests: total number of "hits" to your site during the month. This total does not include any hits on your banner ad.
Average successful requests per day: average daily "hits"
Total successful requests for pages: total number of pages viewed
Number of distinct hosts served: total number of machines from which requests were received. This does not include hosts which only viewed your banner ad.
Some of these machines represent individuals, and some represent gateways serving thousands of people.
We estimate that on average you had two visitors for each host served. If you want to know how many people visited your site, just double the number of hosts served.
Displayed counter value: If your site has a counter on it, then this is the value of the counter as of the end of the month. If your site does not have a counter, this line will not appear on your report.
Displayed counter change: If your site has a counter on it, then this is how much the counter went up during the month. If your site does not have a counter, this line will not appear on your report.
Banner Ad Impressions this month: If your site has a banner ad, then this is the number of hits your ad received for the month. Note that the actual number of impressions will be higher as people viewing the ads through a gateway or proxy server will have gotten the ad from the proxy server, and not directly from your site. If your site does not have a banner-ad, this line will not appear on your report.
Total click-throughs: If your site has a banner ad, then this is the number of click-throughs (people clicking on the ad and going to your site) generated by the ad. If your site does not have a banner-ad, this line will not appear on your report.
Banner Ad click-through rate: If your site has a banner ad, then this is the percentage of banner ad impressions that resulted in a click-through. Click-through rates are typically 0.5%. A click-through rate of 1% is considered very good. If your site does not have a banner-ad, this line will not appear on your report.
Total data transferred: The total amount of data transmitted over the Internet for your site. Our standard hosting arrangement allows you up to 250 megabytes (250,000 kbytes) of data transferred per month.
Average daily data transferred: The amount of data transferred on an average day.
| Total successful requests: 9,783 Average successful requests per day: 318 Total successful requests for pages: 2,285 Number of distinct hosts served: 1,005 Banner Ad impressions this month : 33982 Total click-throughs: 1377 Click-throughs this month: 347 Banner Ad click-through rate: 1.02% Total data transferred: 69,833 kbytes Average data transferred per day: 2,271 kbytes |
Your web site's traffic broken down by date. For each date we report the number of requests/hits (#reqs), the percentage of total data transferred on that day (%bytes), and the number of page views for that day (pages).
In addition, a bar graph is shown indicating relative hit rates for each date.
Blank lines in the report fall between Saturday and Sunday. The above report shows traffic is typically highest midweek, and lowest on weekends.
Similar to the Daily Report, except that traffic is broken down by time of day, rather than date.
For your reference, hour 0 = midnight to 1:00 a.m.; hour 1 is 1 a.m. to 2 a.m., ... hour 23 = 11 p.m. -midnight.
The above report shows a site that is busiest from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern Standard time, and has the least traffic from around 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. Eastern Standard time. This is a fairly typical distribution.
Shows where your traffic is coming from, broken down by domain name. The last part of a domain name shows what country issued the name, and is a good indication of where the visitor came from. For some domains (.net, .com, .edu) we have provided a little more detail. Numbers in parenthesis are details of the domain immediately above.
In the above example 3,530 hits came from machines in the .com domain. Of those, 1,567 machines were in the aol.com subdomain, and 156 were in the compuserve.com subdomain. These machines are most likely proxy servers and service thousands of users each.
Breakdown of traffic by file type. Depending on the makeup of your site,
you may only have some of the following file types:
| .gif | graphics files (do not count as pages) |
| .jpg | graphics files (do not count as pages) |
| (directories) | home pages for a directory |
| .html | normal web page |
| .fp | Form Processing programs (do not count as pages) |
| .w31 | Dynamic pages generated by database look ups |
| .cgi | Custom programs |
| .txt | administrative files (mainly used by search engines) |
shows the number of hits received for each page, graphic, or other element of your web site.
Request Report#reqs: %bytes: file ----- ------ ---- 1,258: 4.15%: / 1,036: 4.33%: /logo.gif 1,021: 4.35%: /navagationbar.gif 1,015: 19.19%: /main.jpg 998: 3.00%: /back2.gif 804: 3.35%: /products.html 758: 12.53%: /photo7.jpg 753: 14.16%: /photo5.jpg 751: 13.52%: /photo4.jpg 751: 13.28%: /photo6.jpg 210: 1.09%: /information.html 197: 4.00%: /photo10.jpg 196: 3.03%: /photo2.jpg 22: 0.02%: /information.fp 13: : /robots.txt |
The above report shows that the home page ("/") was retrieved 1,258 times, but the graphic logo.gif, which appears on the home page, was retrieved approximately 200 fewer times. This is a good indication that many people visiting this site had turned off graphics. Many people set their browsers to ignore graphics. This allows the user to quickly visit a site, viewing only the text. If the text interests them, the user will then load the graphics.
You should also notice that less than 10% of the data transferred was for the text, over 90% of the data, and therefore the time spent loading pages, was for graphics.
Some sites will have low hit counts on the home page, but high hit counts on other pages. This can happen when users find the site from a search engine. Some search engines will refer the user directly to a particular page inside of your site, and not your site's home page.
Prints the URLs from which people came to your pages by number of requests in descending order. This section is useful to see what search engines are referring visitors to you, who has placed links to your site on theirs,where people were before they came to your site, and what visitors are using in their keyword searches.
Referrer Report#reqs: %bytes: URL ----- ------ --- 184: 0.23%: http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=water+samples 60: 0.12%: http://www.yahoo.com/Regional/Florida/Cities/Miami/ 12: 0.14%: http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query 9: 0.14%: http://www.webcrawler.com/cgi-bin/WebQuery 6: 0.07%: http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=sediment+corers 4: 0.06%: http://www.stpt.com/business/businessNEW.html |
May/ 2/97: 316: 3.20%: 74: 
May/ 3/97: 224: 2.44%: 50: 