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Interpreting Web Stats
 
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esprit2004



Joined: 16 May 2004
Posts: 39

PostPosted: Tue Sep 28, 2004 8:40 am    Post subject: Interpreting Web Stats Reply with quote

"Distinct hosts served--This is a count of the individual computers that accessed at least one page of your blog during that day and month."

I was talking to someone who runs another website and he said that on his site, it is impossible to tell the number of individual computers that access a site on any given day since most computers do not have a static IP address.

1) So, I'm wondering, how does the blogware system work that allows us to say that we are counting individual computers?

2) Is the total month tally the combination of all the days during that month?

3) If one computer hits my site once per day, will that count as 30 hits in the month tally?

4) I noticed that a couple times, someone took a photo from my site and placed the photo on another site. The photo, though, was served from my site. So, every time someone hit that other site, it counted as an individual hit to my site. Does the same thing happen when people download, say, a flyer from my site? Does a flyer download count as an individual hit?
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Wed Sep 29, 2004 1:14 am    Post subject: Re: Interpreting Web Stats Reply with quote

I was talking to someone who runs another website and he said that on his site, it is impossible to tell the number of individual computers that access a site on any given day since most computers do not have a static IP address.

That is not exactly true... Whether or not an IP address is static (the user has the same IP address each day and each time he logs on) or dynamic (IP address changes periodically), we can still count the number of unique IP addresses accessing the site during the day.

1) So, I'm wondering, how does the blogware system work that allows us to say that we are counting individual computers?

See above, whether or not the address is static does not really matter, we are counting unique IP addresses.

Of course this is not an entirely accurate way of determining the number of users viewing your website (without restricting access entirely and requiring a username and password, all web stats are essentially estimates and guesses about what the raw data means). Your blog may have a few visitors on dialup accounts who dial in to access a few times a day; their ISP assigned them a new IP address every time they log in so we might have counted a few IPs towards one user. On the other hand, users on corporate networks often appear to the webserver to be originating from the same IP number due to the way corporate firewalls are set up. In these cases, you might have 10 users from one company all sharing 1 IP address, so your stats are undercounting your users.

So Distinct hosts served is one metric for determining the popularity of your site. It is a good guess based on the information supplied to us by your users and their web browser as to how many unique visitors your site had in a given day.

2) Is the total month tally the combination of all the days during that month?

Yes.

3) If one computer hits my site once per day, will that count as 30 hits in the month tally?

Yes.

4) I noticed that a couple times, someone took a photo from my site and placed the photo on another site. The photo, though, was served from my site. So, every time someone hit that other site, it counted as an individual hit to my site. Does the same thing happen when people download, say, a flyer from my site? Does a flyer download count as an individual hit?

When someone downloads a file, or views a web page, that is counted towards your bandwidth which you would see listed as Bytes transferred. But to help you determine how many of your web pages are being viewed, it is not counted in the HTML requests. HTML requests is another good metric to look at to see how popular your site is on a daily basis.

How many people came to the site today and how many pages did they look at? Look at Distinct hosts served and HTML requests and you will have a good way to estimate those numbers.
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