FlashStats Quick Help on Using the Advanced Web Traffic Report Request Form

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	Quick Help FAQ Sample Reports Report Info The Basics Log File Parameters Options Top URLs Requested Top Referrers Search Phrases Most Common Browsers Bad URLs Bad Referrers User Domain Analysis Types of Domains Daily Totals Hits Per Day of Week Hits Per Hour
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Quick Help - Advanced Form

The Basics
Once you have the web traffic report Request Form displayed, you simply enter your user name and password, then hit the Generate Statistics button.

Log File Parameters

The top half of options allow you to specify the log files and URLs to analyze when running web site statistics. An explanation of each field follows.
User: This field specifies the name of your "FlashStats user account." Each person who wishes to run a FlashStats report must have a user account. User accounts are defined in the FlashStats configuration file (FlashStats.ini or FlashStats.conf). The user account definition specifies several parameters, the most important of which is the location of the log files to be analyzed. (A FlashStats installation can have several different FlashStats user accounts, each with access to a different set of log files.)
Password: Enter the password for your FlashStats user account. Most user accounts have a password, although it is possible to configure FlashStats not to require a password.
Page to Analyze: Enter the URL of the web page to be analyzed. This URL will be matched against all requests in the log file, and any request that begins with the URL that you specified will be counted in the analysis; requests that do not match the URL will be ignored in the analysis. The default value to enter here is "/", which means to analyze requests for the home page and all subordinate pages as well. However, if you were to enter a value such as "/products/" then requests for "/products/" and "/products/flashstats/" would be analyzed, and requests for "/sales/", "/", or "/products" would be ignored. ("/products" would be ignored because it didn't have the trailing slash that the specified "/products/" did.)
If using the value "/" shows no results, try "http:" instead. This is necessary for some web servers because they log the entire URL requested rather than just the part after the host name.
Match all URLs starting with this text: If this box is checked, then each log file entry will be tested as described above, and any entry that begins with the text specified in "Page to Analyze" will be analyzed. However, if you uncheck the "Match all URLs starting with this text" checkbox, or select the "Match only this URL exactly" box, then only log file entries that exactly match the specified URL will be included in the web traffic results. For example, if you specified Page to Analyze as "/index.htm" and unchecked the "Match all URLs starting with this text" checkbox, then only requests for the home page will be counted; all other hits will be ignored.
Days to Analyze: Specify the range of dates to analyze. If your browser supports JavaScript (most do), then you can click on Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days, or Same Day Last Week to quickly select the appropriate date range.
Filter out requests from specific IP addresses or domains: Enter a list of specific host names (or IP addresses) of users whose visits should be ignored. This is useful for filtering out visits made by yourself or others within your organization. If your web server does not perform reverse DNS lookup, then you will have to enter IP addresses. You can enter partial strings (such as "1.2.3.") and FlashStats will match against any host name or address containing the specified substring. Multiple values should be separated by commas, with no extra spaces between the values.
Filter out requests for specific file types: You can use this field to enter a list of file types (extensions) which should be ignored. For example, if you want to ignore all requests for graphics files, you can enter something like "gif,jpg". This can be useful when you want to only see hits on HTML pages instead of all hits. Separate multiple values with commas, but with no extra spaces.
DNS lookups: Select this if you are going to run the User Domain Analysis. Enabling reverse DNS lookup will give you more specific information about which domains (if not unresolved IPs) users are coming from. Be advised that this report takes a significant amount of time to generate, and can slow down the overall web traffic statistics report generation and impact your server resources. For this reason, by default neither this, nor the User Domain Analysis report are selected.
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Web Traffic Report Options

Use the lower table to specify which web site statistics you want to see, and how much detail you want to see for each report.
For most reports, you can specify how many lines of detail you want to see. Use a value of "0" (or an empty field) to indicate that you wish to see all log file records. You can also restrict the output to only see results which meet a certain threshhold. For example, to see all records, change the default values of "10 / 0" to "0 / 0". To see only the highest-scoring record, change the values to "1 / 0". To see up to twenty records, so long as they each have at least 5 hits, change the values to "20 / 5".
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Reports

Top URLs Requested: The most common of all web site statistics reports, this report shows the most commonly visited URLs. This will show you which of your pages are being viewed most often.
Top Referrers To Your Site: This report shows the pages on the web which have been used to jump to your site. If your web server does not record the "referer" field then you will not see any results in this report. If you want to filter out referrals from within your own web site, then you should enter your web site domain name in the Filter out requests from specific users field in the top half of the Report Request Form and make sure that the Filter referrers from specific users checkbox is checked.
Search Phrases: This useful report shows you the phrases that are being searched for by users in order to find your site. If your web server does not record the "referer" field then you will not see any results in this report.
Most Common Browsers: This report shows you the browsers being used to view your web site. If your web server does not record the "user agent" field then you will not see any results in this report.
Bad URLs: This report lists invalid URLs that were requested from your site. Wherever possible it will also list the page which contained the invalid link to your site.
Bad Referrers: This report lists pages which have invalid links to your site. This can be slightly different than the extended information provided by the Bad URLs report, so you should be sure to run both reports in order to get a complete picture of invalid links.
User Domain Analysis: This report lists the domains of users visiting your site. If your web server does not perform reverse DNS lookup, then you'll only see IP addresses, which is not that useful. In this case, you should not generate the User Domain Analysis report. Please note that this report is the slowest to generate, since it has to keep track of each individual user that visits your site.
Types of Domains: This report effectively summarizes the User Domain Analysis report. It shows the total number of web page hits generated by each top-level domain (i.e., .com, .net, .edu, .uk, .ca, and so on).
Daily Totals: This report shows you the total number of hits for each day within the report's date range. If you're analyzing a lot of days, this report can get quite large! This report is useful for spotting long-term trends. Week days are shown in red; weekends are shown in blue. This report is very quick to generate.
Hits Per Day of Week: This report summarizes the total number of hits by day of week. This helps you to understand which days of the week are the busiest for your web site. Week days are in red; weekends are in blue. This report is very quick to generate.
Hits Per Hour: This report summarizes hit by hour of the day. This helps you to understand which hours of the day are busiest for your web site. This report is very quick to generate.
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For a complete listing of all reports, their specific functions, the information they return, and to see samples of the reports, please click here.