Following are a list of terms and definitions for your detailed traffic reports:
1. Hits represent the total number of requests made to the server during the given time period - month, day, hour etc..
2. Files represent the total number of hits or requests that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as 404-t 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.
3. Sites is the number of unique 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.
4. 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 FYI: Default is 30 minutes, 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.
5. 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.
6. A KByte - 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.
Common Definitions
1. A Site is a remote machine that makes requests to your server, and is based on the remote machines IP Address/Hostname.
2. 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 accessable to the remote user, or results in an error IE: 404 - Not found. URLs can be of any type - HTML, Audio, Graphics, etc....
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. User Agents are a fancy name for browsers. 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 reported name, so you might see some obvious fake names in the listing.
6. 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.
