Understanding your Webalizer reports
When you first login you will see a page with some graphs which will look similar to this:
The left most graph is for for comparison purposes, it shows the past 12 months so you can view how site traffic is changing over this extended period. The next two graphs show visits, sites and kilobytes of data sent from your site.
Below the column graph is a tabular data table which shows more detailed information on traffic since reports were first generated. Each month links to another page with more detailed information about that particular months statistics.
The Definitions
| Hits | Hits are a measure of the total number of requests made to your website during the given time period. When you visit a web page with 5 images for example, a total of 6 hits are recorded. 1 of these hits is for the document itself while the next 5 hits are for each image. |
| Files | Files are similar to hits in that they count the number of requests made for files from the server. The difference is that the files count is a measure of the number of requests which actually result in a file being sent to the web site visitor. If an image has been cached by the web site viewer in a previous visit then the files count will not be incremented. |
| Sites | A site is a single unique IP address that makes a request to your website. This figure is not particularly useful, as in many cases multiple users share the same IP address. For example, if 10 people within an organisation access your site over a single Internet connection from their workplace, they will all be sharing the same IP address so only a single "Site" count will be recorded. |
| Pages | Pages are the total number of document pages which are requested from your website. Pages such as HTML are counted here, but images or video clips and other multimedia files are not counted. |
| Visits | A Visit is recorded when a website viewer makes an initial request for a page from your website for the first time. If the user views multiple pages from your site within a period of 30 minutes it is counted as 1 visit. If they come back a day later a new visit is recorded. Note that requests for pages only are counted as a visit. |
| KBytes | A Kilobyte is 1024 bytes. This measurement is used to show the amount of data which was transfered between your website and website viewers. |
| URL | When a visitor access your website they are making a request for something (whether it be a page or an image or other data type). A URL is that request, and represents the file which is accessible to website visitors. |
| Referrers | Referrers are the links on other sites which leader a website visitor to your site, or caused their browser to request something from your website. |
| Search Strings | If a user has accessed your website from a search engine, this section will show what search strings they used to navigate to your site. |
| User Agents | User Agents display the type of program which was used to access data on your website. In most cases the User Agent will be a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. Sometimes you may see User Agents refering to "bots" or "crawlers". These are specialised programs maintained by search engines to discover what is on your site for their search databases. |
| Entry and Exit | Entry and Exit pages are those pages which were first visited in a single visit and those pages which were last viewed in a single visit respectively. |
| Countries | Countries are determined based on the top level domain (such as .com.au) from a visitor. This statistic is only moderately useful as many internet service providers use non-country specific top level domain names to assign to each customer. In Australia for example, many people connected to the Internet do not necessarily have a hostname ending in .au |