support > doing more > analog stats

Statistics Information
This document is here to help you understand your free weekly statistics reports.

The most important piece of information we can impart is that you can't tell exactly how many visitors you've had. You can guess by looking at the number of distinct hosts that have requested things from you. But this is not always a good estimate for three reasons.

  1. If users get your pages from a local cache server, you will never know about it.
  2. Sometimes many users appear to connect from the same host: either users from the same company or ISP, or users using the same cache server.
  3. Sometimes one user appears to connect from many different hosts. AOL now allocates users a different hostname for every request. So if your home page has 10 graphics on, and an AOL user visits it, most programs will count that as 11 different visitors!
It is important to realize that "Total successful requests: 30,000" does not mean 30,000 people have read this page.

The two most reliable numbers are highlighted in the two images below.

Img. 1
If you are interested in the total number of pages that were accessed from your site, excluding images, use the number located at the top of the statistics report, shown here.
Img. 2
If you are interested in how many visitors accessed just your home page, use the number located toward the bottom of the report under the "Request Report", shown here.
Statistics example 1
Statistics example 2

Basic Definitions

Our statistics read four categories of request, based on the HTTP status code of the request. You can see the total number of requests for each status code, and what the codes mean, in the Status Code Report.

First, successful requests are those where the document was returned (meaning the visitor got the page requested), or where the document was requested but was not needed because it had not been recently modified and the user could use a cached copy. Sometimes the logfile line doesn't contain a status code. These lines are also assumed by analog to be successes.

Redirected requests indicates the user was directed to a different file instead. The most common cause of these requests is that the user has incorrectly requested a directory name without the trailing slash. The server replies with a redirection ("you probably mean the following") and the user then makes a second connection to get the correct document (although usually the browser does it automatically without the user's intervention or knowledge). The other common cause of redirected requests is their use as "click-thru" advertising banners.

Failed requests are those with an error in the request or a server error. They come about for a variety of reasons, but the most common are when the requested file is not found or is read-protected.

There are a few other types of logfile lines listed in the General Summary. Lines without status code refers to those logfile lines without a status code, and the successful requests in the General Summary only counts the ones with a status code: except if the line contains the name of the file requested, and the filename is being counted, then it's listed in the successes.

Corrupt logfile lines are those which the statistics program didn't manage to parse. And unwanted logfile entries are ones which the statistics program has specifically excluded.

In the Domain Report, domain not given means that the hostname did not contain a dot. Unknown domain means that it did contain a dot, but that the domain name was not in the statistics program's list of recognizable domains.

Just about all of this information was pulled from the Analog Web site. You can read it yourself here. This link is also located at the top of your statistics reports.