Hits

A hit is any file that is requested from the webserver hosting your site. The file can be a web page, a graphic file or any other file you have on your website.

Example: You have a simple website which consists of an index page, a logo and 2 photos, each time someone accesses your webpage this generates 4 hits, one hit for the index file, one for the logo and one each for the photos.

Files

The file count reports how many files were sent to a browser, there is a relationship between hits and files in the form of a hit being a request and a file being the response sent back by the server.

Example: There were 4 hits generated by a visitor to our simple webpage above, therefore 4 files will be sent out as a result of the 4 hits.Note that there is an exception to this if the requested file is already stored in the browser cache or the response is an error message (such as Error 404 Page not found) then no files are actually sent back to the user, therefore they are not reported as files. This does allow you to approximate the number of repeat visitors, since a returning visitor will be responsible for hits but not files.

Pages

Pages represent how many webpages have been viewed. A webpage in this case means an HTML file with either an html or an htm extension. Note that no other files are counted, thus giving you an accurate count of how many pages on your site have been viewed. In the design industry particularly, these are often described as 'page impressions' and serve as a more realistic metric than hits when determining the popularity of a website.

Example: When the index page of our simple webpage is viewed by a visitor, then only 1 page count will be recorded, although there were 4 hits generated.

Visits

This is the count of how many times your entire site has been visited, a single visit may account for 38 hits and 12 pages but only one visit. It is possible that if a visitor leaves your website, then returns later without having disconnected from the Internet then it may still only count as one visit.

Sites

This shows where visitors originate from. This is normally a connection through their Service Provider. Every time a visitor visits your site they account for a single visit. If a visitor browses your website five times in one month they will still only account for one site. Note: Many visitors can appear as though they came from a single site, also a single visitor can come from many sites depending upon the setup used by their Internet provider.

KBytes

This is a measurement, in kilobytes (1024 bytes), of the traffic throughput of your whole website. This value includes all images, multimedia and web pages that make up your website as a whole. The monthly allowance for your account varies, please see below for further information about daily website bandwidth limitations. Note that unless your site gets a lot of traffic, you shouldn't have to worry about running over.

Entry Pages

This is the page that a visitor starts browsing your website, i.e. the page they first viewed when first visiting your website.

Exit Pages

Similarly, this is the last page that a visitor viewed prior to leaving your website. This can help you determine strong and weak pages in your website, it may also help identify what visitors are looking for when visiting your site.

Response Codes

These codes are generated by the web server and indicate the completion status of each request made, a common example is a 404 Error, which means the page a visitor is looking for is not available. Other response codes include successful delivery and access refused codes.

URLs

These are the addresses that visitors are requesting from your website, they may reflect a folder (eg. /holiday/pictures/) or a specific file (e.g /holiday/pictures/sunset1.jpg) These addresses may be requested by visitors, links or have been typed in to a browser.

Referrers

This describes how visitors are finding to your website, whenever a visitor follows a link a "referrer" is always passed to the web server. The referrer describes the last website the visitor was viewing before they started viewing your website. The referrer commonly includes search engine sites, and other sites that have linked to your site.

User Agents

The User Agent shows you information about the visitors that are viewing your website. The information includes information about the browser that your visitors are using, such as the browser name and version number, and also what operating system they are using. Some "web spiders" will also be inlcuded here, these are used by search engines and web indexers to gather information about your site.

Search Strings

These are obtained from examining the referrer string and looking for known patterns from various search engines. It may help you to increase visits to your site by letting you know what visitors have been searching for when they visit your site

Countries

These are determined based on the top-level domain (TLD) 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 TLD may reside in the US, or may reside anywhere else. A .uk domain may be owned by anyone, but is more likely to be located in the UK. A large percentage may also be shown as Unresolved or Unknown. If your visitors use a dialup access points, these do not always resolve to a name and so are left as an IP address.