Figuring out web stats

Newbie seeks stat enlightenment

[galaga]

My ISP provides me with stats 'Generated by Webalizer Version 2.01' and I can figure out most of it. The parts that I understand least are-
1. Top 50 Total URLs.(URLs doing what because they are all pages from my site!? How does this differ from say Top 50 entry pages?)

2. Top 50 Total Sites. How does this differ from above? Why do I only gat a list of IP numbers? And how can I get to the sites with these? I've tried typing htpp://IP.no.here to no avail.

Any demystification of the ancient art of stat decyphering would be greatly appreciated.
And Merry Chrimbo and A Happy New Year to everyone by the way.
Slaine Mhath.

[mark_roach]

I don't know the specific product you are talking about but I would suspect that "Top 50 Total URLs" are the 50 most requested pages on your site.

An "Entry page" is the 1st page that any single visitor requests from your site. The "Top 50 entry pages" report will list these "entry pages", but it may be worse than useless if you have a lot of visitors from AOL, this is because a single real visitor can appear to look like multiple visitors.

"Top 50 Total Sites" is probably a list of the IP address of your 50 busiest vistors.

[Liane]

I have the same (useless) stats. It is the top 50 visitors who hit the most pages. It includes customers and search engines alike. Unfortunately, it isn't the best of reports and unless you know what the IP addresses of the various robots are, its impossible to know which is a search engine and which is a potential customer. Some of the search engine robots are easily identified, such as Fast (cr021r01.sac2.fastsearch.net) but Google and many others are usually identified by an ISP number only.

Sorry I couldn't help more ... but I can't make head or tail of them either. In fact, I've been looking around for a new host just because of the log files.

[rogerd]

Hi, Galaga. You can ask your host if they can resolve the domains in your reports - often that's a software setting that they can enable if requested. Overall, though, it sounds like a poor stats package. I'd suggest finding out if you can access your raw traffic logs and use a different log analysis tool on them. There are also some free and low cost counter services that might do a slightly better job for you.

[galaga]

Thanks!