Underneath is the Summary box, which shows information for the month and year selected above. Throughout this example the data will be from May 2006. In that table is the following information:
- The Reported Period, which is the period selected above.
- The First visit, which shows the timestamp for the first visit that month, which in this case was 4:27 in the morning on May 1, 2006.
- The Last visit, which shows when the last visit for the month started, in this case the last visit started at 10:04 PM on May 31, 2006.
The next rows show summaries for traffic in that month. The Viewed traffic are visits that are actually from people visiting the site, while the Not viewed traffic is traffic from other sources, such as search engines.
There are five common statistics that are going to be used throughout the statistics page: Unique visitors, Number of Visits, Pages, Hits, and Bandwidth.
- Unique visitors are the number of unique clients who visited your website during the entire month
- Number of visits are the number of unique visits during the month, who may or may not be repeat unique clients
- The Pages are the number of times a specific page is viewed
- The Hits are the number of times a page, image, or file is viewed or downloaded.
- Bandwidth is the physical amount of data that has been sent
In your statistics page you will see that information displayed for the month selected in the Summary box.
The Monthly history box shows the five common statistics displayed for the entire year selected, in this case 2006, broken down by month. The month in bold is the actual, current month. This is a good way to look at trends over the course of a year with the visual graph and the table format, with yearly totals shown at the bottom of the table.
There are also shown the Average and Totals for that month. Saturday and Sunday dates are in grey. For instance, you can see that on May 15, the highest Number of Visits was reported for that month. You can also see that on May 12 the highest number of Hits was recorded. These statistics provide you, for example, with a way to see if a new marketing campaign is having an effect on your website, or any number of other reasons you may want to compare day-to-day traffic trends.
Benefits of the Hosts box can include, for instance, where a large amount of spam is coming from if you know that you have been spammed, you can see which Host has the most traffic and that can be an indication from the traffic statistics.
The Robots/Spiders box gives specific information about the search engines that are indexing your site. In this example, you can see Googlebot (the Google search engine's tool) visited the site 76 times.
The File type box displays the different types of file that were downloaded by your visitors. The vast majority of these downloads are automatic by the web browser when a visitor comes to your page.
The Pages-URL box is very useful because it shows you which pages are being seen by your visitors on your site. Thus, the Home Page (here shown by the "/") has the most views, but the Sample Report page (sample.html) is the second most viewed page. This is a good way to see which specific pages are bringing in the visits to your site.
From these boxes you can see which people are visiting your site after searching on a search engine for your site, or a phrase that was used to find your site. In this example, the phrase "home inspection decatur al" led a visitor to the site five times in the month of May 2006. You can also see that Google led to the site 27 times, and that people also visited to the site five times from the HomeGauge search pages when someone was looking for a home inspector in the zip code 35601.
There are also some miscellaneous statistics at the bottom including an estimation at how many times a visitor added the site to their favorites on their own web browser.