LOG ANALYZERS - What the stats mean.

Once you get your statistics it's important you know how to interpret them.

Most common statistics.

HIT RATE.

This is the number of times something from your website was delivered to a visitor. It is NOT the number of visitors you have received.
Each page on your site is made up of many different pieces. The most common are text segments and Graphics files (usually gifs and jpgs). Each one of these is counted as a separate file which is downloaded to make up your webpage on the visitors browser. Each FILE is ONE HIT. Therefore if you have a lot of graphics on your site (say you have a string of twelve buttons - that’s twelve hits). Any banners you are showing will be one hit each.
If you have a complicated page, made up of lots of files you can easily receive 100 or more hits for each page on your site. Therefore the hit rate number could be very high, when in fact you have not had that many visitors.
This means that the hit rate is not really a particularly useful number. Unless you know exactly how many files make up each web page you don't know how many visitors are getting. Most stats programs will do this for you.

VISITORS PER DAY.

This is the really important figure. It tells you how many people have actually visited your site. IF you are doing a weekly report your summary will show an average figure for the week. We consider it's important to have a program that will break this down into how many you get each day.

AVERAGE VISITOR STAY LENGTH.

This figure can be important too, but can be skewed if you get a lot of visitors. It's fairly important to know how long visitors are staying at your site. IF the stay length is minute or less you are not keeping their attention, they are just surfing by. Unless you have a high text information site don't expect visitor stay lengths to be higher than about 5 minutes. Remember this is an average figure. Unless you get a really complex (read expensive) program you won't be able to find out how long each individual visitor is spending at your site. If you are using Start up and exit programs to help advertise your website remember to factor this in. Most people who see these windows will not stop to view your site (only about 10% stay to browse), but it will push up your ‘number of visitors’ and thus decrease your visitor stay length number.

MOST REQUESTED PAGES.

Which pages on your website visitors are looking at the most. This is very important in for further development of your website. You may think that a particular subject of product is not as important but the statistics could show you that this is what your visitors are most interested in. Use this information to make your site more interesting to your visitors. Give them what they want, not what you think they want.

MOST REQUESTED FILES.

This is only useful if you have files that are important. In this context files means ‘real’ files rather than anything that will be considered a hit. If you care about this function you will need a program that divides your files into ‘real’ files and graphics files. It's unlikely anyone is interested in how many times your logo was shown but if you are offering files for downloading you will most certainly want to know how many people are accessing each file. In our case we use this function to monitor your flash greeting cards and determine which are popular and which are not.

MOST REQUESTED GRAPHICS.

If you are using the above function you should get this category too. In most cases it's not very useful, but if your site has graphics that you want to track it can be very important. Bear in mind that anything that is important to you will be way down the list. The highest hits are always going to be on things like your title and logo which most likely appear on every page.

MOST POPULAR HOUR & MOST POPULAR DAY.

This can be very important in determining when you should do maintenance on your site. If you need to bring it down at any time you don't want to do it at a time when your site is most popular. You want to try and figure out which day and time is the least used and do the work then. For routine updates to the site this is not important, and if your site is hosted somewhere you have no control over the information may be of little use. But if you do have a choice picking a low hit rate time can be very important. Don't just assume it will be late at night on Monday. People access the internet at all hours of the day and night, you may find your highest hits are 1am on Tuesday morning!

TECHNICAL ERRORS.

This will list all those times you get ‘404 error page not found’. If you are getting a lot of these you may want to check out what the cause is. It's possible their is a malfunction of a broken link at your site which is causing the problem. These technical errors are very important in determining if you site is functioning correctly. Don't ignore them.
Note: Don't worry if you get a lot of errors from robots.txt. This is a search engine program spidering your site, it is nothing to worry about. favicon.ico can be a similar program or it can be hackers trying to find a crack in your site. If you are getting a lot of these you might want to talk to your website administrator.