How do I
see my site statistics, and what do they mean?
You need to know
how many people visit your web site, which pages they look at, if they get any
errors, and much more. You need to know what search words were used, and how people
got to your site. All this information is available for every domain hosted with
us.
To
access your stats, you need to point your browser to:
http://www.yourdomain.com/stats
You
must replace both "www.yourdomain.com" with the domain name you want
to see the stats on. You will be prompted with a log in box:
Type
in the user name and password that you were sent when you signed up for your account
(your FTP or e-Mail user name and password will work here - if you have been given
no user name and password, please contact Support@InternetDesign.com).
You can chose to have your PC remember them for you.
When
you log in, you will see the AWStats for EasyAdmin screen. This screen may take
a few seconds - or even a few minutes for really busy sites, as the computer is
compiling information about all the visits to the site. Be patient!
The
1st graph lets you select what year and month to look at. It will default to the
current month, showing you the traffic for that month in terms of Visits, Visitors,
Pages Hits, and KB.
First visit will
be the time and date that the first visitor went to the site that month. The time
is PST. next is the month and year, with links to previous years (if your site
has been hosted with us over the turn of a year or more). Last visit is the time
and date of the last visitor before you ran the report.
Next
is the number of visitors who came to your site. It follows a visitor as (s)he
goes from page to page, so visitors will always be lower than page views. Pages
shows how many pages have been requested. If you link to an image, that will not
be counted as a page.
Hits
is the one that catches most people out. If you have a web page with 6 images
on it (Logo, product picture, 4 buttons), if someone visits that page, it is 5
hits - 1 hit for the web page, and one hit for each image on that page.
KB Shows how much
bandwidth you have used - how much memory all the hits have used as they have
been sent from the server to your guests. This will help to let you see if you
are close to your bandwidth limit. You will need a lot of traffic to hit your
limit!
The graph shows
the above numbers in a pretty, and fairly useless way!
Click
the months underneath to see the a different months traffic - this will change
this graph, and all the following ones.
Next
is details on Visiting domains countries and hosts. Since this help file was created,
the software has been updated, and it now does list the countries that visited
your site:
Robots/Spiders
gives you information about the automated guests your website has. This is essential
information for a web master or mistress. This informs you which search engines
are indexing your site, and how often they are doing so.
This
example page shows that Inktomi's slurp robot has been very busy at this site
- however Jeeves has been here a lot less often. It also shows that 3 unknown
robots have been here - either from new search engines, or coding written by someone
who has not yet documented it.
Next we have the
top 25 pages - obviously if you have under 25 pages on your site, this will be
the top x pages - x being the number of pages on your site.
This shows that
the search.cgi script is the most popular page, by a long way! After it was renamed
to iDsearch.cgi it got less traffic. HOME PAGE is popular too - that being the
main index page.
Next
is Hours (Server time) (No picture). This is the time that your site is visited.
Unless you are advertising your web site on TV or Radio at specific times, I really
can see no use for this - but it's there if you want to look at it!
Used Browsers and
used OS are more interesting - especially if you are using Flash, Java, or streaming
multimedia.
87.3% of you are
using Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Click the Versions link to see which version
is being used. A lot of unknowns are listed. Clicking that shows who the unknown
are. Netscape - once the dominant browser is now coming in at 4.5%. Click to see
which versions are being used. The list of unknown operating systems usually ties
in with the unknown browsers.
"Connect to
site from" is another invaluable tool. It shows how your guests get to your
site.
A lot of valuable
information is here. 223 hits from bookmarks, or people typing the URL in directly,
52 hits from Google (So that search engine is going us good). No links from newsgroups
(not a surprise - we do no promotion there!) The rest is details of web links
- mainly from www.internetdesign.com - telling me who is linking to this site.
Another vitally
important table is the Top 25 keywords used on search engines. This tells us what
key words are working and, indirectly, which ones are not.
It look like a
lot of you are looking for help with those .iaf files! From here I can see what
help is wanted, and what areas are being used. I can see if I need to add more
keywords, or change them. If you are actively promoting your site, you should
be examining this information at least once a week.
Finally
we have the errors. 404 means file not found - indicating a link to a page that
does not exist on your site, or the inclusion of an image that you have not uploaded.
Click on the 404 to see exactly what is missing.
There
is a lot of information here, a lot to work through, but this information can
help you keep your site working well, and help you promote it with success.
