Project settings

Search engines –the search engines of interest are specified here. It is very common for 99% of search visits to a website to originate from just one or two search engines. In this case, it makes sense to turn off the other search engines in your project settings. This will improve the clarity of the log-file analysis reports.

Files to analyze – the list of log-files that you wish to analyze is specified here.

Add, Delete – these keys allow you to add or delete items from the log-files list.
Log-files are text files containing administrative information about server requests. Server requests occur each time a visitor interacts with a website. Analysis of the log-file can tell you what parts of the site get the most traffic, how long visitors stay on a page, what patterns are present in visitors' interaction with the site and so on. As a rule they are kept at the server not as pure text files but as zipped (compressed) files (*.zip, *.gz, etc.) to keep them relatively compact. The "Log analyzer" module is capable of working with both text and compressed log files. Compressed log-files will be automatically uncompressed by Log analyzer before analysis.

Analyze – this option starts the log-files analysis procedure.


General statistics

The general statistics report contains information on number of visitors, unique IP addresses, page views and the number of visits from search engines. All the data is divided into sections by date and the "Total" column shows a summary for the selected period.

Date – the date of the log-file for which the analysis was made.

Unique IP addresses. Every computer connected to Internet is allocated a unique IP address that allows it to interact with other computers on the net. After any server request, (for example, page view, image view, file download, etc.) the IP address record of the originating computer is recorded in the log-file together with other information.

Each visitor generating site requests will obviously leave many records with the same IP address in the log-file. Some IP addresses can also be recorded even though a person did not visit your site. This may happen when viewing external sites that contain items, such as images, loaded from your site. Since the items are being downloaded from your site to the visitor of the "other" site the IP record will appear in your log-file.

Visitors. The total number of unique IP addresses will give an estimate of the average numbers of visits to a website. As noted above, the presence of a unique IP address does not necessarily indicate a real visitor who has viewed your website. Log analyzer will provide visitor statistics for those real visitors who have generated requests to download your site html-pages. The number of real visitors is indicated in this column.

PageViews. Each real visitor surfing your website site may view a considerable number of pages. This column indicates the number of downloads of all pages. This figure is not directly related to site visits but is an indication of how many pages average visitors to the site have viewed before quitting.

Searchers. Visitors to your site will come from different sources. One of the most important sources of visitors is search engines and such visits merit special analysis. This column indicates the number of visits originating from the search engines.
Chart This is located under the table and shows the data from the "Visitors" column in graphical form.


Page access statistics

Statistics on each page of the site are shown here.

Visits – this option shows the number of accesses of the page. All types of access, such as visits from search engines or from other sites are included here.

Searchers – this option shows the number of site visits originating from the specified search engines.

Bandwidth – shows the total amount of traffic in megabytes that this page/file generated.

Search engines list – shows the number of site visits originating from each search engine.


Keywords statistics

The keywords that visitors used to find your site in the search engines are shown here.

The total number of visits originating from all search engines as well as the number of visits originating from specific search engines is indicated for each keyword.


Referrers

The referrer is the site address that the visitor came from before entering your site. This report contains information about the referrers, i.e. the sites that direct visitors to you.

Do not include referers from the specified domain - filters referers from the selected domain

Referring domains – shows the names of sites (without indicating specific pages) from which your own site was visited. Some of these sites may have links to your site on several pages and this could complicate the analysis. This is especially true for search engines because pages containing the search results are created dynamically. This causes each visit from a search engine to look like a visit from a new and unique web page. This report includes only the names of referring domains to avoid such a display of a confusing web page names.

Referring URLs – shows the full address of each referrer.


Countries

The geographic distribution of your visitors can be a very important factor in promoting your website.

Each computer that connects to the Internet is allocated a unique IP address. There is a specific correspondence between IP address and country. If you know the IP address, it is possible to determine the country that originated the request.
Information about numbers of visitors from various countries is also given in this report in the form of a chart and a table.


Paths, Entry pages, Exit pages

When entering your website a visitor will arrive at a web page. This may be your website homepage or one of the secondary pages. After arriving, a person will typically view a few pages and then exit the site. The entry point, the path through your website and the exit point are all useful items of information that can be extracted from log-files.

Paths – the most popular paths are displayed in this report. For example, if a person entered page www.site.com/products.html , then went to the homepage www.site.com, followed by www.site.com/services.html and then exited your site, the entire path would be shown as: www.site.com/products.html-->www.site.com-->www.site.com/services.html

Entry pages – the pages from which a visitor begins to view the site are shown here. In this example, www.site.com/products.html is an entry page.

Exit pages – the pages from which a visitor exits from the site are shown here. In this example, www.site.com/services.html is an exit page.

Search engines robots

Before your site gets into the search results it should be indexed and added to the search engine database. The search robots - agents of search engines navigating the new pages not yet available in the search engine index, and updating information about the pages already known to the search engine are engaged in this operation. The given report provides the information concerning the search robots' visits to your site.

Spider (Robot) – the name of the search engine, the visits of which are presented in the table.

Page (Page) - a page or a file name to which the robot has addressed.

Host, IP - the computer name and the IP-address. Frequently the situation could occur that one of the fields is missing in the logs. In this case both the fields will be filled with the information defined, i.e. in some cases the values of these fields could coincide.

Date - request date.

Status - the status code, the server reply code (200 - OK, 404 - the page not found, etc.)

Log record – the direct log file string containing the whole information on the request of the robot.