Haverford uses a web statistic program to track the usage of our web sites including the whole Haverford College web site and individual department or program web site. Yearly, monthly,daily usage statstics are presented, along with the ability to display usage by Hits, Files, Pages, Sites, Visits, KBytes, URL, Entry/Exit page, Country.

The yearly report shows the statistics for a 12 month period, and links to each month. The monthly report has detailed statistics for that month with additional links to any URL's found. The statstics over a year will be archived.

This document will help you understanding the terms used by our statistic program.

Hits

Any request made to the web site is considered a 'hit'. The requests can be for anything... html pages, graphic images, audio files, CGI scripts, etc...

To count the hits for Haverford College, any requests starting with http://www.haverford.edu will be counted as hits for Haverford College.

To count the hits for individual department or program, any requests to your department or program web sites, they will be considered hits for your department or program.

For example, any requests starting with http://www.haverford.edu/admcomp (the Administrative Computing home page) will be considered hits for Administrative Computing department. And this hits will be added to the total of hits for the Haverford College (http://www.haverford.edu).

This number of hits represents the total number of requests that were made to the web site during the specified report period.

(Note:See examples below)

Files

Some requests actually result in something sent back to the user, such as a html page or graphic image. When this happens, it is considered a 'file' and the total of files is incremented. The relationship between 'hits' and 'files' can be thought of as 'incoming requests' and 'outgoing responses'.

Not all hits will send data back to the user, such as 404-Not Found requests and requests for pages that are already in the browsers cache (the pages have been viewed already).

(Note: See examples below)

Pages

Generally, any HTML document, or anything that generates an HTML document, would be considered a page. This does not include the other stuff embedded in the document, such as graphic images, audio clips, etc... So this number represents the number of 'pages' requested only.The default action is to treat anything with the extension '.htm', '.html' or '.cgi' as a page.

(Note: See example below)

Examples:

The follwoing examples explain how to count hits, files and pages:

For example: a client requests http://your.site/test.html and test.html includes one image

a) assume all of them are available,

total hits are two (one test.html + one image)
total files are two (one test.html + one image)
total page is one (one test.html)

b) assume html is found, but the image is not found,

total hits are two (one test.html + one image)
total files is one (one test.html)
total page is one (one test.html)

c) assume the html page is not found

total hits are one (one test.html)
total files is 0
total pages is one (one test.html)

Sites

The 'sites' number shows how many unique IP addresses/hostname were made requests to your web site during the reporting time period. This will roughly estimate the number of computers from which a request is made to your web site. This DOES NOT mean the number of unique individual users (real people) visited.

Visits

Whenever a request is made to the web site from a given IP address , the amount of time since a previous request by the address is calculated (if any). If the time difference is greater than a pre-configured 'visit timeout' value (or has never made a request before), it is considered a 'new visit', and this total is incremented (both for the site, and the IP address). Currently, the timeout value is set to 30 minutes. So if you visit the site at 1:00 in the afternoon, and then returns at 3:00, two visits would be registered. Note: Visits only occur on page with extension '.htm', '.html' or '.cgi'.

KBytes

The KBytes (kilobytes) value shows the amount of data, in KB, that was transfered between the web server and the remote machine during the specified reporting period.

Note: A kilobyte is 1024 bytes, not 1000 :)

Top Entry and Exit Pages

The Top Entry and Exit tables give a rough estimate of what URL's are used to enter the web site, and what the last pages viewed are. Because of limitations in the HTTP protocol, log rotations, etc... this number should be considered a good "rough guess" of the actual numbers. However, it gives a good indication of the overall trend of where users enter and exit the site.

URL

Uniform Resource Locator. All requests made to to a web server need to request something. A URL is that something, and represents an object somewhere on server, that is accessible to the remote user, or results in an error (404-Not Found). A URL can refer to any type of file (html, audio, graphics,etc...).

Countries

Countries are determined based on the top level domain of the requesting site. This is somewhat questionable however, as there is no longer strong enforcement of domains as there was in the past. A .COM domain may reside in the US, or somewhere else. An .IL domain may actually be in Isreal, however it may also be located in the US or elsewhere. The most common domains seen are .COM (US Commercial), .NET (Network), .ORG (Non-profit Organization) and .EDU (Educational). A large percentage may also be shown as Unresolved/Unknown, as a fairly large percentage of dialup and other customer access points do not resolve to a name and are left as an IP address.

Response Codes

They are defined as part of the HTTP/1.1 protocol. These codes are generated by the web server and indicate the completion status of each request made to it. For example, 404 stands for Not Found.

Referer

The URL of the document that the user points to.

User Agent

The browser that the user is using to issue the request. For example: Mozilla/4.0 (Compatible,MSIE6.0, Windows NT 5.1)