Anytime a visitor comes to your website, each visit and click is logged in a log file. At night, the stats program, reads the log file and tries to organize the information into something meaningful. It can tell the following:
What page a vistor entered on, what page they left on, the time they spent viewing a page, whether the page was reached from another internal page or from an outside link, etc.
We can also see the IP address of the visitor. This is all we know about the visitor. IP addresses are not an exact science, at least for a stats engine. They make inferences of where the visitor is coming from based on the IP, but IPs do not always work the same for each visitor. For example, AOL users, regardless of where they actually are surfing from, all get routed through Virginia, so the stats program will show an inordinate amount of people are surfing from there.
There is also a ton of traffic which is clandestine in nature; usually bots sniffing around for email addresses to spam or trying to find exploits in computers to infect with viruses. This type of traffic most certainly uses masking tools to cloak their ip address or may be coming from thousands of different places in a co-ordinated attack. As you can imagine, this wreaks havoc on our systems and the stats engine now has the added burden of trying to sift through the logs for 'real' traffic while ignoring the malicious kind. Often this can appear as N/A (not available) and should be ignored or treated as suspicious. Often huge jumps in traffic can be attributed to malicious bots.
Our system does not use unique file names for each page the way most websites do so you need to take a step further into the stats to determine which pages are being visited. Either click the little blue tube icon next to each page that is listed when doing a traffic report to get to the data mining screen
or go directly there as follows:
1. Click on Data Mining in the Reports section on the left hand side
2. Select 'What query strings were passed to this file?' from the menu
3. Add in /gallery.asp or /content.asp and then generate the report
The page name is included in the query string results.
Article ID: 26, Created: January 22, 2010 at 2:37 PM, Modified: January 22, 2010 at 2:37 PM