We include a simple but informative web statistics package called Webalizer. If you feel you need a more robust statistics analyzer package, there are third party solutions available, though we do not have any recommendations for a particular analyzer.

Here we are going to show you a bit about what statistics are and how to read the Webalizer statistics pages. For more information on statistics, click on the Webalizer version link at the bottom of the Webalizer page.

Accessing Webstats:
Go to www.yourdomainname.com/webalizer and enter your user name and password.

Once you have logged in you will see a button option called "Run Stats"...click that button and then, on the next page, click "View New Stats." The next page will be as shown below.

The top graphic is a bar chart of the various statistics from month to month. The lower graphic has the actual numbers for each of the categories.

Under Summary by Month you see the various categories listed across the top and the months listed down the left side. The main stats to pay attention to on this page are Visits and Pages.

Hits, as used in the stats program should be ignored as they are the total of "calls" made to the server from each request by a visitor. When the visitor requests a page, the page itself is a request, then any pictures or graphics used on that page are considered separate hits to the server. That is why you should primarily concern yourself with Visits and Page Views.

Think of a "Visit" as a session. If someone visits the site on the Home page and goes to 2 more pages, that is 1 Visit and 3 Page Views. If someone visits the site this morning and then comes back this afternoon, those are separate sessions and they count as 2 Visits. The number of visits is very important, but the number of pages viewed is equally as important because it is an indicator of how much information people are seeing while on your site. For instance, if your average daily visits are 20 and your average daily page count is 40, that tells you that the average visitor came to your home page and 1 other page. If the page count was 80, the average visit would have been the home page plus 3 additional pages.

My average page count is low because I have so many people that come to my site thinking they are at dan-bailey.com (note the hyphen), a fly fishing supply site, and then leave immediately. That is also a good example of why statistics can be less meaningful if you do not know the whole story.

When you click on a month link, you are moved to another page which has more detail about the statistics for that month, as well as several reports that may be of interest. Here is info on a few of the reports.

Daily Statistics
This is interesting in that you can see a break down of visits and page views on a daily basis. This information can be particularly helpful when running an ad campaign. Hourly statistics are also available.

Top XX of XX Total URLs
This gives you an idea of which pages are being viewed the most. The reports don't break out the "Visits", so you just have to get a relative idea from the ranking (from top to bottom). Just remember that only files with an htm, html or php extension are pages that you need to be concerned with.

Top XX of XX Total Referrers
Referrers are basically the pages that the visitor was on before the next page they are on. Sometimes the referrer is another page within your site, sometimes the referrer is a search engine or directory. Obviously, the more referrers that are from off your site the better.

Top X of X Total Search Strings
If you have a referrer listed that is a search engine, then you are likely to see search strings listed in this report. Simply enough, search strings are the words that the visitor used at a search engine to get the results that they clicked on to get to your site.