Understanding Webalyzer

Here’s a sample of Webalyzer statistics in action
http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/sample/index.html

 

Understanding the Webalyzer's analysis of your site

The Webalizer is a web server log file analysis program which produces usage statistics in HTML format for viewing with a browser. The results are presented in both columnar and graphical format, which facilitates interpretation. Yearly, monthly, daily and hourly usage statistics are presented, along with the ability to display usage by site, URL, referrer, user agent (browser), search string, entry/exit page, username and country (some information is only available if supported and present in the log files being processed). Processed data may also be exported into most database and spreadsheet programs that support tab delimited data formats. The following is an explanation of the terms used in a typical Webalyzer report.

Referrers
Referrers record sites that are sending visitors to your site by way of hypertext links. This is valuable information when determining how your search engines presence is affecting your site's traffic.

Hits
Any request made to the server which is logged, is considered a 'hit'. The requests can be for anything... html pages, graphic images, audio files, CGI scripts, etc... Each valid line in the server log is counted as a hit. This number represents the total number of requests that were made to the server during the specified report period.

Files
Some requests made to the server, require that the server then send something back to the requesting client, such as a html page or graphic image. When this happens, it is considered a 'file' and the files total is incremented. The relationship between 'hits' and 'files' can be thought of as 'incoming requests' and 'outgoing responses'.

Pages
Pages are generally any HTML document or anything that generates an HTML document. This does not include the other objects included in a document, such as graphic images, audio clips, etc... This number represents the number of 'pages' requested only, and does not include the other objects included on the page. What actually constitutes a 'page' can vary from server to server. The default action is to treat anything with the extension '.htm', '.html' or '.cgi' as a page. A lot of sites will probably define other extensions, such as '.phtml', '.php3' and '.pl' as pages as well.

Sites
Each request made to the server comes from a unique 'site', which can be referenced by a name or ultimately, an IP address. The 'sites' number shows how many unique IP addresses made requests to the server during the reporting time period. This does not mean the number of unique individual users (real people) that visited. This is impossible to determine using just logs and the HTTP protocol although however, this number is as close as you will get.