Thread: stats

I hope I'm in the right forum. It was a toss up of here or Blue Voda. It is about my stats. It says that my website got 5,581 hits yesterday. I am sure that it did not. In October it says I received 27,000 hits. Why would it record this number?

Then it says that I have received 83 unique visitors. Now I haven't clicked on my site 5,500 times. In October I had 227 unique visitors. Can someone explain this to me? (Not bad I guess for someone not even in business yet.) Thank you.

Hits is when a unique user runs his mouse across items on your page. and there are other elements to it.... basically you had 83 visitors and they looked intensly through your site.


In order to keep this simple, we will use the same mechanism as the Web Servers use to determine a hit. That is, if your visitors ask for a file for the server, that will be considered a single hit.
The general impression is that every page is considered a single hit. However, that definition does not provide a fair measurement of server usage. For instance, there might be a single page with some text and 5 graphic images (gifs) on it. That page is "hitting" the server with 6 requests. One for the page and one for each gif on the page. The server keeps track of every one of these hits.
Hits are also size dependent. Hits can never be larger than 25,000 bytes. If a single file is larger than 25,000 bytes, (only very very very long text files and large image/binary files are that big), we will round it up to the nearest multiple of 25,000 and calculate the number of hits. For instance, a 95,000 byte executable will be calculated as 4 hits. We at InfoStreet, find using the hits as a measurement of server usage, the most fair method.

What are web logs?
If you have web logging enabled, every hit to your website is being logged. Every time someone goes to your site, entries are added to the web logs for everything from regular hits, secure hits, image hits, server-side include file hits, errors, and referring sites. Here is an example of a regular web hit:
—
127.0.0.1 - - [16/Mar/2006:06:42:17 -0500] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 1543
“http://unixsource.org/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en)
*****WebKit/417.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/417.9.2″
—
These logs can add up quickly. The more hits you get and the more complex your site is put together, the more log entries you have…and thusly, the more disk space your logs use. And remember, a “hit” isn’t just a visit to your website, a hit means a hit on your page itself AND a hit for every image on that page as well.
Here’s a good way to break it down: if you had a simple web page with, say, text and two graphics, a single visit to that page would yield approximately 1KB of a log file. Obviously, a typical website has more than two images on a page…and multiple pages that comprise the site. But based on that sample two-image page alone, 1000 visits would accumulate 1MB of log files. And since the log files can exist on your server forever, you can see that over time, this file can add up to a large portion of your disk alotment.


Yes like Sadain says .... lol ....

CiCi - you and I probably are to account for most of those hits - I know that I've been looking at pages with a fine tooth comb to work on your seo - and everytime you send me to look at changes.

The numbers you want to watch right now are unique visitors. Yes, it's good that people look at more pages and things on the pages - but that's to be expected when you're asking people to look at the site (in site review here) and when we're working on it.

Yes, but Bethie, but we are talking about almost 6,000 in one day. And thank you Sadain and Ladyeye. I have a better picture now. I am just amazed...

CiCi - did any of the se's visit your site on that day? The more pages they visit - the higher those numbers will be also as they try to see everything.

Is there some sort of help file or tutorial associated with these stats, with my limited knowleded i find it difficult to work out what its telling me?

Here's an article explaining awstats:

http://www.webmasterstop.com/47.html