List of Webalizer Daily Statistic Report Terms

Any request made to the server which is logged, is considered a 'hit'.  The requests can be for anything... html pages, graphic images, audio files, CGI scripts, etc... Each valid line in the server log is counted as a hit. This number represents the total number of requests that were made to the server during the specified report period.

Files

Some requests made to the server, require that the server then send something back to the requesting client, such as a html page or graphic image. When this happens, it is considered a 'file' and the files total is incremented. The relationship between 'hits' and 'files' can be thought of as 'incoming requests' and 'outgoing responses'.

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Pages

Pages are, well, pages! Generally, any HTML document, or anything that generates an HTML document, would be considered a page. This does not include the other stuff that goes into a document, such as graphic images, audio clips, etc... This number represents the number of 'pages' requested only, and does not include the other 'stuff' that is in the page. What actually constitutes a 'page' can vary from server to server. The default action is to treat anything with the extension '.htm', '.html' or '.cgi' as a page. A lot of sites will probably define other extensions, such as '.phtml', '.php3' and '.pl' as pages as well. Some people consider this number as the number of 'pure' hits... I'm not sure if I totally agree with that viewpoint. Some other programs (and people :) refer to this as 'Pageviews'.

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Sites

Each request made to the server comes from a unique 'site', which can be referenced by a name or ultimately, an IP address. The 'sites' number shows how many unique IP addresses made requests to the server during the reporting time period. This DOES NOT mean the number of unique individual users (real people) that visited, which is impossible to determine using just logs and the HTTP protocol (however, this number might be about as close as you will get). 

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Visits

Whenever a request is made to the server from a given IP address (site), the amount of time since a previous request by the address is calculated (if any). If the time difference is greater than a pre-configured 'visit timeout' value (or has never made a request before), it is considered a 'new visit', and this total is incremented (both for the site, and the IP address). The default timeout value is 30 minutes (can be changed), so if a user visits your site at 1:00 in the afternoon, and then returns at 3:00, two visits would be registered. Note: in the 'Top Sites' table, the visits total should be discounted on 'Grouped' records, and thought of as the "Minimum number of visits" that came from that grouping instead. Note: Visits only occur on PageType requests, that is, for any request whose URL is one of the 'page' types defined with the PageType option. Due to the limitation of the HTTP protocol, log rotations and other factors, this number should not be taken as absolutely accurate, rather, it should be considered a pretty close "guess".

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KBytes

The KBytes (kilobytes) value shows the amount of data, in KB, that was sent out by the server during the specified reporting period. This value is generated directly from the log file, so it is up to the web server to produce accurate numbers in the logs (some web servers do stupid things when it comes to reporting the number of bytes). In general, this should be a fairly accurate representation of the amount of outgoing traffic the server had, regardless of the web servers reporting quirks.

Note: A kilobyte is 1024 bytes, not 1000 :)

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Top Entry and Exit Pages

The Top Entry and Exit tables give a rough estimate of what URL's are used to enter your site, and what the last pages viewed are. Because of limitations in the HTTP protocol, log rotations, etc... this number should be considered a good "rough guess" of the actual numbers, however will give a good indication of the overall trend in where users come into, and exit, your site. 

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Referrers

Referrers take many shapes and forms. What is contained in the referrer field varies depending on many factors, such as what site did the referral, what type of system it comes from and how the actual referral was generated. For instance, a referrer may have your site bookmarked in their browser, they may hae simply type your sites URL field in their browser, they could have clicked on a link on some remote web page or they may have found your site from one of the many search engines and site indexes found on the web.

If the user just typed your URL into their browser or clicked on a bookmark, there won't be any information in the referrer field and will take the form "-" (Direct Request). Referrers that came from search engines, dynamic HTML documents, CGI scripts and other external programs usually tack on additional information that it used to create the page. A common example of this can be found in referrals that come from search engines and site indexes common on the web. Sometimes, these referrers URL's can be several hundred characters long and include all the information that the user typed in to search for your site. The Webalizer deals with this type of referrer by stripping off all the query information, which starts with a question mark '?'. The Referrer "http://search.yahoo.com/search? p=usa%26global%26link" will be converted to just "http://search.yahoo.com/search".

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Search Strings

The Webalizer will do an analysis on referrer strings that it finds, looking for well known search string patterns. Most of the major search engines are supported, such as Yahoo!, Altavista, Lycos, etc... Unfortunately, search engines are always changing their internal/CGI query formats, new search engines are coming on line every day, and the ability to detect _all_ search strings is nearly impossible. However, it should be accurate enough to give a good indication of what users were searching for when they stumbled across your site.

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Hits by Response Codes

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