pwebstats: glossary of terms

General Statistics.

• Request

  Also known as an "access" or a "hit", a request is when a web browser asks for an object (html file, image, script or program) from your web server, and gets a response.

• Total requests

  The total number of requests for all objects on your web server.

• Unique requests

  The number of individual objects that were requested from your server. Each object will ususally be requested more than once, giving the higher Total Requests figure. For example, the home page of your server counts as one unique request, but could be, say, up to 25% or more of your total requests.

• Unique hosts

  The number of distinct computers making requests to your web server, i.e. the number of people looking at your web server. Note that this will under-report the total number due to folks using proxy servers. Ten people using a proxy server will only show up as one unique host.

• Local Domain

  Defined in the pwebstats.conf file, the local domain is usually the IP number range and/or domain of yourorganisation.

• Network

  is defined as all hosts with a fully-qualified domain name ending in .net

• Unresolved

  IP numbers in your log file that cannot resolve into fully-qualified domain names. This is usually because an organisation (or someone in it) has used IP numbers in their range without bothering to create DNS records for them.

Pages and Collections.

• Visitors

  The same as unique hosts, except just for the collection or page as defined in the pwebstats.pages file.

• %local

  The percentage of hits from users in the local domain, as defined in the config file.

• Page views or page impressions

  to find the number of page views, add the following line to your pwebstats.pages file:
  
  /$|^/.+.html$:Total number of pageviews:0
  
  This will give you the figures both for pageviews and the number of individual visitors to your site.