Summary Manual - Questions

Questions

You have questions, Summary has answers.

How many people have visited my web site? - The Summary, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly Reports all have a number called "Unique Hosts". This is the number of distinct IP addresses visiting your site. It is a reasonably good approximation of the number of people visiting your site. It will be too high because some people will visit more than once from different IP addresses. This most often happens because dialup users get different addresses each time they dial up. It will also be too low because proxy servers combine the traffic from many users into one IP address. These effects will never exactly cancel out, but they usually come fairly close, leaving a reasonable approximation to the number of people.

What speed internet connection does my server need? - The Peak Hours report shows the number of BPS (bits per second) used during the busiest hours covered by the report. To provide good responsiveness to your users, you should have a connection that is at least twice as fast, and hopefully three times as fast, as the highest number shown. If peak hourly BPS is approaching half the speed of your internet connection, your line is getting saturated and users are probably experiencing delays and failed connections. It is also important to allow for growth, more and more people are using the internet all the time. Traffic doubling every six months to a year is not unusual, and many sites see much higher rates of growth.

What keywords are people using to find my site? - The Search Words and Search Phrases reports show the words and search strings users used with the major search engines to locate your site. You should look at the top words used and compare that with your own idea of the keywords that apply to your site. Words that you think are important but are not highly used can be moved into more prominent positions at your site to increase search engine traffic. Words that are used to find your site, but which you feel are not representative should be removed from page titles and used less frequently.

Have there been problems with the web server that I didn't notice? - The Gaps in Service report can be used to keep any eye on your server. Summary determines a gap in service by comparing a period when no requests were served with the historic pattern of your normal web server activity. These may represent periods when the server was down, when logging information was lost, or when your internet service provider was failing to provide a connection to the internet.

Do I have links to pages or graphics that do not exist? - The Bad Links report can be used to look for links to pages and graphics that do not actually exist. It lists items which were frequently requested but consistently got errors, along with the top places those requests came from. You can use this list to decide if you should provide the item in question or if the referring location needs to be changed. Keep in mind that pages which are frequently requested by users, but do not exist, may represent an opportunity to create content, rather than requesting the referring location to change their link.

What operating systems are the people visiting my site running? - The Platform Report lists the operating systems in use by visitors to your site.

What browsers are the people visiting my site running? - The Browser Report lists the browsers and major version numbers in use by the visitors to your site.

When did Excite (AltaVista, InfoSeek, etc.) last update their index of my site? - The Web Robots report shows the Latest Hit date for the major search engine indexing robots. You can also compare the numbers of Hits and Visits to see how completely they have examined your site.

What are the most common internet connection (modem) speeds of the people visiting my site? - The Connection Speed report shows the frequency of hits from users with different connection speed. Note that these will not be accurate if you are saturating your servers connection to the internet or if many of your users have a higher speed connection than you do. Not all servers log sufficient information to produce this report, see the Log Formats section of the manual for more information.

What are the most popular pages/graphics/downloads/etc. on my site? - The Pages, Downloads, Graphics, and Others reports show your content listed by popularity.

Who has links to my site? - The Referrers report shows places that have links into your site. You can also look at the Referring Domains report to see them grouped into domains, which makes it easier to spot sites with may links to your site or many different names for the page with the link to your site. The New Referrers report can be helpful to find the most recent links made to your site.

Where do people enter my site? - The Entry Point report shows the places where people first enter your site.

Where do people leave my site? - The Exit Point report shows the last page viewed before people leave your site. Depending on the kind of site you have, people leaving can be caused by boring content, confusing links, links to other sites, long chains of links to find content, irrelevant content, and many other causes. Expect pages with large hit counts to have high Exits numbers simply because people move on after a little while independent of content.

How long do people spend reading my pages? - The Avg. View Time report shows the average time people spend looking at a page before moving on to another page at your site. Long view times generally represent interest in your content.

Which files are using up all of my bandwidth? - The Requests by Bytes report can be used to determine which items are using most of your bandwidth. To reduce bandwidth look for items that are using a lot of bandwidth and then reduce their size, eliminate them, or make references to them less common. You can replace graphics with smaller versions, remove content that uses a lot of bandwidth, re-write pages to refer to fewer graphic and multi-media elements, or get a higher speed internet connection.

Who is using my graphics on their pages without permission? - The Hijacking report shows the portion of visits referred by a given domain that loaded only graphics. This is typically caused by sites using your graphics on their pages. In some cases you may want to complain to the webmaster or the other site, change the names of your graphics so their links no longer work, or take other appropriate actions.

How quickly does my site load over a modem? - Developers who have a local ethernet connection to their web site can forget how much time it takes to load large graphics. The Modem Proxy feature in Summary Pro provides a proxy of your web site with the data transfer rate slowed down to about the speed of a 56K modem.

Which ads result in visitors downloading my demo? - The 'Goal' feature can be used to track what percentage of visitors from a given referring domain, or using a particular search phrase, get to a specific place in your site. You configure "Requests to count as Goal" as a list of the requests you want to track, say downloading the demo of your software, and the Referring Domains reports and Search Phrases reports will show the percentage of visitors that make a request on that list.

There was a large jump in traffic today, what is causing it? - Most of the time a large jump in traffic is caused by a new referring link at some major site. These can be spotted quickly by looking at the Referring Domains report and looking for a Hits Over Time graph that has a traffic spike in the same place as the overall traffic spike you are interested in. Sometimes, if the traffic is associated with a particular platform you can get additional information by looking at the Platform report or the Browser report for a similar shape.

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