We are using a popular statistics package called AWStats to display our web site reports.
There is a "Number of visits" report in AWStats. However, you should know this is just an estimate. It is actually technically impossible to accurately report the number of visits to a web site, due to the nature of the Web. Accurate statistics have become impossible due to the use of proxies to reduce network traffic. A proxy "caches" (stores) a page the first time it is accessed. Subsequent accesses used the cached copy instead of the actual copy on the Web server. This allows companies with large amounts of users, like AOL, to reduce their network traffic. The downside of caching is that it will skew the statistic reports so that the number of requests will actually be underreported. This is part of the reason why a visit report does not make any sense.
A measurement that is more useful is "Unique visitors". This is a count of each computer that accessed your web site. This should be closer to the number of users that have accessed your web site.
The term "hit" is commonly used in web statistics. A hit is any type of file requested, including Web pages and images. Visitors are more useful than hits for analyzing your site.
The "Search Keyphrases" and "Search Keywords" reports are very useful. The Search Keyphrases report lists the most popular phrases that visitors used on search engines to find your site. The Search Keywords report lists the most popular words that visitors used on search engines to find your site. The Hourly report time data is in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) which is generally 5 hours ahead of local time.
The "Referring sites by domain" report shows the most popular sites that visitors came from before looking at your web site. The web log information that the statistics are generated from can only report information that the visitors to the web site provide. For example, if they block the Referrer field in their browser it won't show as a referrer report as a legitimate web site (it may end in something like .me). Also, if the hit is coming from a search engine like Google it won't provide the Referrer information either. So the numbers may disagree with Pay Per Click or other reports from a web site you advertise with, with theirs being higher (sometimes much higher if they are counting every search engine download/crawl of their site).
It is typical for the graphs to "plunge" at the end, due to the fact that the reports are run every Tuesday morning and only include partial data for the current day and current week. When you look at the report next week, you will be able to see full statistics for these days.
The reports should be self explanatory. If you have any questions, please email us at sales@halsys.com and we'll be happy to assist you.
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