Documentation: Chapter 6
Report Descriptions
This chapter of the documentation will explain each type of report that FlashStats can generate. There is a brief discussion at the end of this chapter about improving FlashStats' performance.
Reports
The following fields are displayed for all reports:
- URL Analyzed: the page or directory being analyzed (for example, the root directory and all subdirs)
- Date Range Analyzed: the days being analyzed by the report
- Date of Report: the date the report was created (which may be different than the days being analyzed)
- HTTP Requests: the total number of requests ("hits") during the days analyzed (excluding filtered-out requests)
- HTTP Bytes Served: the total number of bytes served by the web server during the days analyzed
Important: You can use FlashStats to analyze either a single file or directory, or an entire directory and all subdirectories.
A summary of which pages were requested by users. Please note that this report automatically filters out requests for files ending with .GIF, .JPG, or .JPEG. Because of this automatic filtering you may see a number of hits reported here that is different than the total number of hits displayed in the Summary Report.
The Top URLs Requested report is the only report to automatically filter out graphics files.
| Top Referrers To Your Site |
This list shows how users are finding the analyzed page. This is determined by the REFERER= field of the HTTP request, which needs to be output to your log file.
Most referrals will be from within your own web site. For this reason, you may choose to filter out referrers by using the filter string and checking the "Filter referrers" checkbox.
The scope of this report is the specified URL and all subdirectories (if appropriate).
This useful report shows the phrases that are being used to search at the most popular search engines. By default, FlashStats will report on searches conducted with 31 major search engines; you can also define custom search engines to be included.
You can use this report to determine which search engines are leading the most users to your site, as well as what types of phrases users are searching for when they find your site.
This report is also useful for determining any weaknesses in your search engine listings. Look for any search engines which yield relatively few hits to your site, or which yield hits based upon odd phrases. You should have these search engines rescan your site.
The scope of this report is the specified URL and all subdirectories (if appropriate).
A summary of the browsers that accessed the specified URL. Note that the Summary field in the report header summarizes the number of hits from Netscape-brand browsers (i.e., it excludes "compatible" browsers), and the number of hits from Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers.
The scope of this report is the specified URL and all subdirectories (if appropriate).
This report shows all URLs which were invalid because they didn't exist and therefore returned a "404 Not Found" error code to the user. This report can be very useful to find bad links to your site. If you find that a particular bad URL is being requested a lot you may want to run FlashStats against just that URL to see the Referrals To Your Site report so that you can find out what pages have an invalid link on them.
In addition, this report can optionally list the referrer which generated each bad request. This information can be incredibly useful so that you can track down invalid external links to your site and then try to get them fixed. Note that a bad request may not have a referrer, so the number of referrers shown might be less than the number reported by the Bad Referrers report.
The scope of this report is the specified URL and all subdirectories (if appropriate).
This report lists all of the referrers which have invalid links to your site. The referring pages are grouped and sorted by the number of bad requests that they caused.
The scope of this report is the specified URL and all subdirectories (if appropriate).
This list shows the different registered domains that people are accessing your pages from. For example, "netcom.com" indicates the user is accessing the pages from Netcom's domain.
The scope of this report is the specified URL and all subdirectories (if appropriate).
This list summarizes the types of domains that users are coming from.
The scope of this report is the specified URL and all subdirectories (if appropriate).
This report simply shows the total number of (filtered) hits for each day in the current report. This is most useful to spots trends over a period of several days. If you want to run this report for a long period, you should turn off the other reports (except for Hits Per Day of Week and Hits Per Hour); this will yield a dramatic increase in performance.
The scope of this report is the specified URL and all subdirectories (if appropriate).
Please note that FlashStats' standard Report Request Form has some JavaScript logic in it which de-selects this report if you are analyzing only one day, or selects this report if you are analyzing more than one day. Of course, you can manually override these settings.
Total number of hits by the day of the week for the specified URL. This report helps to determine the busiest days of the week.
The scope of this report is the specified URL and all subdirectories (if appropriate).
Please note that FlashStats' standard Report Request Form has some JavaScript logic in it which de-selects this report if you are analyzing only one day, or selects this report if you are analyzing more than one day. Of course, you can manually override these settings.
Total number of hits by the hour for the specified URL. This report helps to determine the peak access times.
The scope of this report is the specified URL and all subdirectories (if appropriate).
Recommendations For Performance
If you find that FlashStats is taking a long time to run, we recommend that you run it against a smaller set of data (i.e., fewer days, or just a subdirectory instead of the root /).
You can determine the shortest time possible to run your reports by generating just the Hits Per Hour, Hits Per Day of Week, or Daily Totals report (or all three) and no other reports. These reports are the quickest reports to generate, and they will give you an indication of the minimum time required to process your log files.
Finally, if things still seem to take too long, you may want not to generate the User Domain Analysis report. This report tends to generate a lot of data due to the wide variety of user domains, and therefore takes a long time to create.
The Top Referrers To Your Site report also takes a relatively long time to generate.
You should also ensure that you rotate your log files often enough to keep them to a reasonable size. See your web server documentation for more information on log file management.
Version 1.5 -- Last update: 2/8/01
