If you are confused about what all that information in the stats is, read below for more detailed information.

The opening page shows you the usage summary per month. If you look at it over the course of a few months it helps to show you the usage at a glance for a month at a time. The green bar is the hits (how many total) the darker blue is how many files were hit and the lighter blue is how many pages were hit (green is the total). The red on the side shows how many kilobytes were downloaded (perhaps useless to you -- it counts the pictures and the text and calculates the "weight" of the page and how much of it was viewed). The important thing to look at is the month. Select a month and click there. It summarizes what you need to know.

On the right side are the monthly totals. Look where it says Total Visits. That is unique users. Total Hits is the total number of hits to the page, but that is not unique hits (some of the same people came back).

This page also defines all the hits by hour, by day, etc. A lot more detail than you probably need, but it is there for the viewing. It breaks it into what percentage you got your largest number of hits at the bottom. This helps you in case you ran an ad that advertised the Web site. In the days following the ad, see if your numbers go up. This graph helps you to do so.

The best stats to note (besides number of unique users) are the referrers (how people are finding your site) and the search terms (what people are putting into search engines to find your site).

Below is the technical explanation of the terms used in your stats.

Main Headings
Hits represent the total number of requests made to the server during the given time period (month, day, hour etc..).

Files represent the total number of hits (requests) that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as 404-Not Found requests and requests for pages that are already in the browsers cache.

Tip: By looking at the difference between hits and files, you can get a rough indication of repeat visitors, as the greater the difference between the two, the more people are requesting pages they already have cached (have viewed already).

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.

Visits occur when some 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.

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.

Common Definitions
A 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. All requests made to a web server need to request something. A URL is that something, and represents an object somewhere on your server, that is accessible to the remote user, or results in an error (ie: 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 is a fancy name for browsers. Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera, Konqueror, etc. are all user agents, and each reports itself in a unique way to your server. 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 strong enforcement of domains as there was in the past. A .COM domain may reside in the United States or somewhere else. An .IL domain may actually be in Israel; however, it may also be located in the U.S. or elsewhere. The most common domains seen are .COM (U.S. commercial), .NET (network), .ORG (non-profit organization) and .EDU (educational). A large percentage may also be shown as Unresolved/Unknown, as a fairly large 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. These codes are generated by the web server and indicate the completion status of each request made to it.