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Website Statistics
Accessing Web Statistics for Your Township
Merit is using a free software program called "Webalizer" to collect statistics on your web server.
Statistics for your township's website are processed on a weekly basis. Processing occurs on Monday
mornings between one and four a.m.
You can access your statistics with any web browser. The URL for your statistics
will follow the format:
http://mytownshipname.mi-twp.org/stats/
You will be prompted for your username and password. This is the same username and
password you use for accessing your dial-in and e-mail accounts.
A web page will display a folder for each year statistics have been collected.
Click on folder for the year that includes the time period you want to view.
In this example, we've clicked on the year 2002. A summary page appears
displaying the data available collected to date.
Click on a month to get detailed statistics for that time period.
The links above the monthly page allow you select a more detailed view
for a
specific time period within the month. We've included some sample displays here.
Most Popular Items At Your Site
First Place Visited At Your Site (Rank Ordered)
Last Item Requested by a Visitor to Your Site (Rank Ordered)
Text Used in A Search To Find Your Site (Rank Ordered)
Graphical Yearly Summary
Tabular Yearly Summary
A website offers a way for you to disseminate information about your organization to the world at
large. Anyone with a web browser and an Internet connection has the potential to visit your website.
Visitors to your page may find you by typing your web address directly into their browsers, by clicking
on a link on someone else's website or as a link returned as a result of a query to a search engine such
as "Yahoo" or "Google."
How many people are visiting your site? What information are they accessing once they get there? How
did they find you? Are they the audience you are trying to reach? Where did they come from? What
information seems to be the most popular? Are there areas where no one seems to visit? How long do they
stay at the site after they find it?
Webpage statistics provide the data to answer these questions. You can use the data to help fine tune
the design of your website. For example if you find that the zoning ordinances page is the most
frequently visited location at your website, you might consider putting this information as close to the
top level of your website as possible. By monitoring your webpage statistics you will be able to see the
impact of your changes and refine your website design to ensure visitors can easily find the information
you want to share with them.
The data that is collected about visitors to your website is not 100% accurate. It is quite possible
that your site was visited more often than shown by any webpage statistics program. This is due to
"caching." In order to decrease bandwidth demands, many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) keep local
copies of frequently and/or recently requested web pages on a server local to their network. If a
potential visitor requests a page that is stored on the local server it is delivered to the visitor from
that server rather than sending the request to the actual website. When that happens there is no record
of the visit to your site that the statistics program can count.
Statistics are gathered over the following set time periods: annually, monthly, daily, and hourly.
Below are the statistics Webalizer captures:
Pages |
are those URLs that would be considered the actual page being requested, and
not all of the individual items that make it up (such as graphics and audio clips). Some people
call this metric "page views" or "page impressions", and defaults to any URL that has an
extension of .htm, .html or .cgi. |
Visits |
occur when a remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the
first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they
will all be considered part of the same "visit." If the site makes a request to your server, and
the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default
is 30 minutes), a new "visit" is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages
will trigger a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non- page URLs will not be
counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits. |
Hits |
represent each individual item in the total number of requests made to the
server during the given time period (month, day, hour etc.). A single web page may be associated
with multiple hits, one for the page itself and additional hits for each item (e.g. graphics on
the page). A hit can be thought of as an "incoming request." |
Files |
represent the total number of requests that actually resulted in something
being sent back to the visitor such as an html page or a graphic image. A file can be thought of
as an "outgoing request." |
Sites |
is the number of unique IP addresses/hostnames that made requests to the
server. Care should be taken when using this metric for anything other than that. Many users can
appear to come from a single site, and they can also appear to come from many ip addresses so it
should be used simply as a rough gauge as to the number of visitors to your server. |
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KByte (KB) |
is 1024 bytes (1 Kilobyte). Used to show the amount of data that was
transferred between the server and the remote machine, based on the data found in the server
log. |
Site |
is a remote machine that makes requests to your server, and is based on the
remote machine's IP Address/Hostname. |
URL (Uniform
Resource
Locator) |
represents an object somewhere on your server, which is accessible to the
remote user, or results in an error (e.g., 404 - Not found). URLs can be of any type (HTML,
audio, graphics, etc.). |
Referrers |
are those URLs that lead a user to your site or caused the browser to request
something from your server. The vast majority of requests are made from your own URLs, since most
HTML pages contain links to other objects such as graphics files. If one of your HTML pages
contains links to 10 graphic images, then each request for the HTML page will produce 10 more
hits with the referrer specified as the URL of your own HTML page. |
Search
Strings |
are obtained from examining the referrer string and looking for known
patterns from various search engines. The search engines and the patterns to look for can be
specified by the user within a configuration file. The default will catch most of the major
ones. |
User
Agents |
are a fancy name for browsers. Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera are all
User Agents, and each reports itself in a unique way to your server. Its version number and the
type of operating system it is running on uniquely identify this User Agent. Keep in mind
however, that many browsers allow the user to change its reported name, so you might see some
obvious fake names in the listing. |
Entry/Exit
pages |
are those pages that were the first requested in a visit (Entry), and the
last requested (Exit). These pages are calculated using the Visits logic above. When a visit is
first triggered, the requested page is counted as an Entry page, and whatever the last requested
URL was, is counted as an Exit page. |
Countries |
are determined based on the top-level domain of the requesting site. This is
somewhat questionable however, as there is no longer as 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 Israel, 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 significant
percentage of dialup and other customer access points do not resolve to a name and are left as an
IP address. |
Response
Codes |
are defined as part of the HTTP/1.1 protocol (RFC 2068). These codes are
generated by the web server and indicate the completion status of each request made to it. |
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