Cog SEO Blog

Posted By Melanie Prough on May 16, 2009

There are many programs used inside the server environment to analyze logs and provide analysis of many different metrics of the site. Most times your server / hosting company will provide some sort of stats program for you, sometimes even two. I did a little digging and will cover a few details about what appear to be the top 4 programs out there right now.

When choosing a stats program there are many factors price, options, dependability, compatibility, and ease of use. Here is a very helpful comparison table. I will cover these factors below:

1. Webalizer stats – Webalizer is free and distributed under the
   GNU. Webalizer has the option in configuration to exclude certain pages from the stats, like a contact page for example. Webalizer also has an html interface with and outside link you can password protect in htaccess, then you and your customers can access fromanywhere. Webalizer was designed on and for an Intel system running Linux, however was written to be as close to ANSI/POSIX specs as possible in order to be easily ported to other platforms. These stats have never let me down, I have used them for many years. I love the interface. My stats are stored monthly and can be retrieved by just a click.
2. AWStats - Is free and distributed under the GNU. You must be able to run perl scripts (.pl files) from command line and/or as CGI (Perl 5.00503 or higher required to run AWStats 6.0 or higher). AwStats also monitor mail and ftp logs in addition to site
   http logs. Has personalized report capability. I cannot speak for the ease of use, yet…..
3. ModLogan – ModLogan stats are free, but no longer maintained. I have this on my server. I turned it on started poking around and found some things I really like. It also has an html interface that be accessed by customers, or you can export the report to a text
   document. ModLogan tracks a few interesting things others I’ve seen do not. Pages per visit, time spent per visit, it does a much nicer job of tracking spiders, cache hit ratio, tracks broken links, and customers like this..it keeps a running total of users who bookmarked a page and which one. So maintained or not, it has its merits.
4. Analog – Is a free stats program released under GPU. Analog seems to boast most loudly about “pretty” report capability, using Report Magic a graph and report building program. The program runs in C so compatibility should not be an issue. I can’t speak for interface or ease of use, no demo or shots.

Many times you will find the solution is a combination of programs. I use Webalizer, ModLogan, and Google Analytics (page stats). However I may look in to replacing my Webalizer with AwStats after this report. So we have some idea what these program are, and how they might work…..how do we read and understand
those stats?

• Hits are the total number of requests made to the server in the given time period (month, day, hour etc..).
• Visits or Unique Visits occur when a remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a
  given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is usually 30 minutes), a new Visit is started
  and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non- page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.
• Page Views are each time a visitor views a web page on your site resulting in multiple hits, but only 1 page view.
• Visitor is the browser of a human user who accepted a cookie.
• Files are the total number of hits (requests) that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as 404-Not Found requests and requests for pages that are already in the browsers cache.
• Sites is the number of unique IP addresses/hosts that made requests to the server.
• Pages are those URLs that would be considered the actual page being requested,
  and not all of the individual items that make it up (such as graphics and audio clips). Some people call this metric
  page views or page impressions.
• Sessions are the number of users visiting the site in a specific period of time.
• Page views per session are the amount of
  times your pages are viewed by the people that visit your website.
• Time per visit simply the average time a user spend surfing your site.
• Pages per visit the average number of pages a user surfs or views
  in a visit. (sometimes tracked in a daily, or monthly metric also)
• Cache hit ratio is the percentage of all accesses that are satisfied by the data in the cache. Also known as “hit ratio.”
• Bounce Rate is the percentage of people who visit your website and immediately leave.
• KByte (KB) is 1024 bytes (1 Kilobyte). Used to show the amount of data that was transferred between the server and the remote machine, based on the data found in the server log.
• Referrers are those URLs that lead a user to your site or caused the browser to request something from your server. The vast majority of requests are made from your own URLs, since most HTML pages contain links to other objects such as graphics files.
• User Agents are another name for browsers. Netscape, Opera, IE, etc.. are all User Agents, and each reports itself in a unique way to your server. However, many browsers allow the user to change it’s reported name, so you might see some obvious fake names in the listing.
• Entry/Exit pages are those pages that were the first requested in a visit (Entry), and the last requested (Exit).
• Countries or country of Origin is determined based on the top level domain of the requesting site. This is somewhat questionable however, as there is no longer strong enforcement of domains as there was in the past. A .COM domain may reside
  in the US, or somewhere else. An .IL domain may actually be in Israel, however it may also be located in the US or elsewhere.
• Response Codes are defined as part of the HTTP/1.1 protocol
  (RFC 2068; See Chapter 10). These codes are generated by the web server and indicate the completion status of each request made to it.
• Requested URLs this is the user requested pages from your site, and how many times each in the specific time frame requested.
• Hosts is the IP addresses of your visitors, how many visits and
  sometimes hits too are tracked here.
• Indexed pages this is supposed to be the number of pages
  indexed on whichever engine your stats track, but I caution you these are generally not accurate…especially if you were
  not prompted for your SOAP/API key. I suggest you check them with the site:www.yoursite.com command in regular search, it is supported by Google and Yahoo. Using Google’s and Yahoo’s Webmaster Tools is even better.
• Robots is the name of the robot and number of times the visited usually. Some stats can tell you where they went on their visit.
• Bookmarked pages simply keeps a running tab of the number of times each page was bookmarked by a user.
• Request Protocol defines the HTTP request/response protocol
  between clients and servers.
• Hits by Response Code the number of hits in the specified period defined by the status code definition such as 200, 206, 301, 302, 404…etc.

There are certainly other metrics that are available on these and other stat programs, if you have one you don’t understand use the manual or help section. If you are unable to find the stats information you can Wiki it like “define unique visitors”. I hope you find this to be helpful. Your stats are the lifeline to understanding and growing your site, so understanding them is imperative.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough

Categories: SEO Tools, Webmaster Posts
Tags: Analog, Awstats, Comparison Table, Hosting Company, Htaccess, Html Interface, Logs, Mail, Metrics, Perl Scripts, Posix, Report Capability, Server Environment, Webalizer