Website Visitor Statistics

Web stats taking a long time to process? - The first time you run a report for a period the raw logs are processed and compressed, which can take some time. Subsequent reports for the same period are much quicker.

If you are running a report for a period for the first time, allow a few minutes for the report to appear. If you find that the report times out, try reducing the period to one month, or one week.

Overview

Website stats are usually based on raw log files generated by the web server. These log a "hit" every time a page or image is accessed. The problem with conventional logs is that they cannot differentiate between "hits" by search engines, spiders and other "internet noise" and real human visitors. Also they cannot identify access by individual computers.

Our web stats do not use web server logs, instead the logs are generated by the web page itself only when it is viewed from a conventional browser, i.e. when a real person looks at your web page.

Our web stats use cookies. About 95% of browsers have cookies enabled and it is only those pages that are viewed using cookie-enabled browsers that get analysed in the web stats. Using cookies allows us to tell you how many unique visitors you have had per day, it also allows us to exclude pages viewed more than once by the same individual to give you a clear picture of your website traffic. For example, if someone goes to your home page, then the contact page, then back to the home page, the home page will only record one page view.

Referrers by domain

This tells you which domains (websites) your traffic is coming from. For example, the result for http://www.some-domain.com will add up the traffic from all pages under that domain, e.g.

http://www.some-domain.com/about.htm
http://www.some-domain.com/products.htm
etc.

Referrers by unique URL

This shows the domain listed, but you may find the same domain listed more than once. If you hover over the domain you will see the full URL for the individual page at the bottom of the screen. Clicking the domain will open the actual page that contained the link to your web page.

We don't show the full URL in the results table as some URLs are very long and would result in a table that cannot be viewed or printed easily.

"No referrer" and "blockedreferrer"

"No referrer" means that the visitor entered your website by typing the address directly into the address bar rather than by following a link from another site.

"blockedreferrer" means that the visitor has software installed on their computer to hide this information.

Querystrings

A querystring is the bit after the "?" in a URL. Use querystrings in your online adverts (on Google for example), you will then be able to easly identify visitors from each individual advert, which is very useful for measuring the return on your advertising budget.

For example, your advert might use the URL:

http://www.your-domain.co.uk/?ad001

"ad001" will then be listed as a querystring in your report and identifies how many people have clicked on that particular advert.

Note: if your advert links directly to your home page, don't forget the "/" before the "?" (see above example). You don't need the "/" if your advert links to a page on your website, e.g.

http://www.your-domain.co.uk/my-page.htm?ad002

Search strings

This is the text that the visitor typed into a search engine to get the listing that contained the link to your web page.

Pasting results into spreadsheets

Ticking "Don't show graphs" shows the same results but without the bar graphs. With this option you can easily select the results that are of interest and copy and paste them into an Excel spreadsheet for futher analysis or presentation.

Comparing periods

Clicking the link "Open a new window to compare reporting periods" will open up another window so that you can compare two or more periods side by side, useful for spotting trends.