Web Log Analysis Tutorial – Lesson 2: Basic concept of web log analysis

I. Hits and Visits

A log entry will generate a “Hit” on the web server. This can include pages, images, animations, audio, video, downloads, PDF or Word documents or anything else that you allow visitors to access. When a web browser loads a page, it also loads all the components referenced by that page. For example, if a web page contains 5 images, a visit on that page will generate 6 “Hits” on the web server, one hit for the web page, 5 hits for the images.

A unique visitor is determined by the IP address or cookie. By default, a visit session is terminated when a user falls on inactive state for more than 30 minutes. So a unique visitor may visit your web site twice and get reported as two visits.

If the visitor left the web site and came back 30 minutes later, Nihuo Web Log Analyzer will report 2 visits. If the visitor came back within 30 minutes, Nihuo Web Log Analyzer will still report 1 visit.

II. Page views

Page is any file or content delivered by a web server that would generally be considered a web document. This includes HTML pages (.html, .htm, .shtml), script-generated pages (.cgi, .asp, .cfm, etc.). Image
files (.jpeg, .gif, .png), javascript (.js) and style sheets (.css) are generally not considered to be pages.

A page view (PV) or page impression is a request to load a single page of an Internet site. On the World Wide Web a page request would result from a web surfer clicking on a link on another HTML page pointing to
the page in question. This should be contrasted with a hit, which refers to a request for a file from a web server. There may therefore be many hits per page view since a page can be made up of multiple files.

III. Bandwidth

Measure (in kilobytes of data transferred) of the traffic on a site. If you are billed for bandwidth usage on a monthly basis you can see an estimate of the amount of bandwidth your web site used in the General Statistics report.

IV. Web Spider

Web spider is a program used by search engines, also known as a crawler or robot, searches the internet scanning web pages to include in the search engines index. All activities caused by web spiders will also be recorded into web log files.

V. Stolen object

Stolen object report reveals cases in which your images and other non-page objects have been embedded in, or directly linked to by, pages on other web sites. This does NOT mean that the files have been stolen in any legal sense. It does, however, mean that your content is being displayed, heard or shown outside the context of your own web pages.

For example, if an outside site places this code in a popular web page:

<img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/yourpicture.jpg”>

Then your image will be displayed thousands of times, possibly without any attribution or permission on your part. This report is extremely valuable in identifying such situations.

VI. Unique Visitors

The number of individuals who visit a web site during a specific time. The same person visiting twice is only counted once.

VII. Session

A period of interaction between a visitor’s browser and a particular web site, ending when the browser is closed or shut down, or when the user has been inactive on that site for a specified period of time.

For the purpose of Nihuo Web Log Analyzer reports, a session is considered to have ended if the user has been inactive on the site for 30 minutes. You can update this setting in Option dialog.

VIII. Referrer

An http referrer or referrer is anything online that drives visits and
visitors to your Web site.
This can include:

search engines
blogs
link lists
banner ads
email
affiliate links
links built into software

Technically, even offline sources like print ads or references in books or magazines are referrers, but these aren’t specifically captured in
the server referrer log. When a Web developer uses the term “referrer” she means those sites or services that are referenced in the Web server
logs.

IX. Bounce rate

It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

The formula used to calculate bounce rate is:

Bounce Rate = Total Number of Single-Page Visitors / Total Number of Visitors

A bounce occurs when a web site visitor only views a single page on a website, that is, the visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. There is no industry-standard minimum or maximum time by which a visitor must leave in order for a bounce to occur. Rather, this is determined by the session timeout of the analytics tracking software.

This entry was posted on August 6, 2009, 1:33 pm and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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