Usage Reports

WebTrends 8.0

The same reporting menu will be used with version 8.0 webstats.das.state.oh.us:81

To view version 8.0 reports enter the username: anonymous
The password: anonymous.

To navigate to a specific time period, click on the day in the calendar, the month, the week, or the year.

To view a section of the report click on the menu appearing in the left column. The beginning of each "chapter" has a dashboard page which summarizes the content area. Details are available on the internal pages of each chapter which can be accessed through the navigation list on the left or the graph titles.

Once on a detail page there will be a set of graphs and a list of pages. At the top of the list of pages is a drill down icon which looks like a sheet of paper with a magnifying glass. This link will display a query screen which can be used to select a sub set of the data available on the displayed page.

To ask a question, and subsequently assist us with building an FAQ page, use the request link.

WebTrends 8.0

Each month usage reports are run against the log files generated for the websites on the hosted environment. These reports are available to hosting customers at this address webstats.das.state.oh.us:81. Reports for the current and previous year are maintained on this site. Hosting customers are encouraged to view these reports on a regular basis. Any missing reports should immediately be brought to the attention of the Digital Ohio staff through the Feedback form. Log files are not maintained beyond a few months and once the log files have been deleted missing reports can not be generated.

The various sections of the Usage Reports are summarized below. Suggested areas deserving special attention are indicated in bold.

• General Statistics - This section provides totals for Hits, Page Views, Visits & Visitors.
  
  
• Top Pages - This section lists the top 100 pages viewed in the reporting period. It is important to realize that this list will include pages that were visited by spiders as well as by people. If the Average Time Viewed is listed at NA then chances are good that that the page was visited by a spider and not viewed by a website visitor.
  
  
• Dynamic Pages & Forms - This section lists the most popular dynamic pages and forms executed by the server in the reporting period.
  
  
• Top Exit Pages - This list represents the page that the visitor was viewing when they left the site. Leaving the site includes following an external link, shutting down the browser, entering another url, using a bookmark to another site, etc.
  
  
• Top Paths Through Site - This section groups page sequences by visits. The most commonly visited single pages will appear at the top of the list followed by sets of pages in view order. Having a page that is 3 or 4 clicks down appear in this area from month to month suggests that the page content should probably be available directly from the front page.
  
  
• Most Downloaded Files - This section lets you keep track of how often your files are downloaded.
  
  
• Top Visitors - This list represents the IP numbers of website visitors. As a general rule numbers beginning with 156 and 198 represent state entities. To lookup the organization that owns an IP number use one of the commonly available reverse DNS lookup sites such as swhois.net.
  
  
• Summary of Activity for Reporting Period - This section provides a snap shot of the busy and light times and days for the site. The identification of the least active hour of the day can help identify the best time for major site update work.
  
  
• Summary of Activity by Time Increment - Provides greater detail of the activity levels for each day of the period.
  
  
• Average Time to Serve Documents and Average Time to Serve Dynamic Pages & Forms - Provides an average in milliseconds of the time it took to deliver pages.
  
  
• Activity Levels by Hours Details - Provides an activity total for each hour of the day.
  
  
• Visitor by Time Increment - This section shows how many visits there were to the site on each day along with the average time for the visit.
  
  
• Technical Statistics and Analysis - This section presents the site hits split up by successful, failed, redirected and chached hits. The failure percentage should receive special attention. Efforts should be made to keep this rate below 3%. Since this percentage includes errors made by users, vulnerability scans looking for files that hopefully do not exist or do not execute, as well as including bad links from other sites, it is probably not possible to keep the percentage much lower.
  
  
• Dynamic Pages & Forms Errors - This section indicates the percentage of form submissions that failed. Details for these pages are included in the Client and Server error sections.
  
  
• Redirects - This page lists dynamic page and document redirects.
  
  
• Client Errors - This section indicates the error codes received by site visitors. Attention should be focused on the number of 404 errors.
  
  
• Page Not Found (404) Errors - This section indicates the target URL that was not found and the referrer page containing the broken link. If referrer pages are on your site then this section provides a list of links to be corrected. Any links outside of your site or any references to no referrer can be ignored. 404 errors for robots.txt and favicon.ico can also be ignored.
  
  
• Server Errors - This section provides totals for the number of server errors encountered.
  
  
• Server (500 series) Errors Detail - This section identifies pages that returned a 500-series error. For the most part basic 500 errors that do not contain any error message text are a result of a process that could not be completed due to a lack of server resources at that point in time. In the existing shared environment this is often because another site or application is consuming all the available resources. In the new environment each site is insolated from the other sites so as to prevent this occurrence. Any database connectivity or ASP error codes and messages will appear in this section.
  
  
• Top Referring URLs - This section lists the urls in order by the number of visitors they directed to your site. No Referrer indicates that the visitor arrived at your site by using a bookmark are typing in a url.
  
  
• Top Search Phrases with Engines Detail - The search phrases that led visitors to your site are provided here along with the search engines that were used. When the words appear without any quotes around them they would have been found on a page in any combination. When they appear within quotes then they are located on one of your pages as that exact phrase.
  
  
• Top Browsers & Top Platforms - These two sections indicate the percentage of hits and the number of visits attributable to each of the major browser categories and each of the Top Platforms. The information in these sections can be used to help identify the browsers and platforms that should be in your testing environment. Agency policy should determine if all possible browsers will be tested or if only the top x percent.
  
  
• Netscape Browsers & Microsoft Explorer Browsers - These two sections list the specific versions of the Netscape and Explorer browsers that website visitors are using. It should be noted that many of the spiders are represented in the log files as using the older versions of the Netscape browser.
  
  
• Visiting Spiders - This section lists the various spiders that have visited your site. In many instances this represents visits by search engines.