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Notes & Reference

1. What is Wusage?

2. How do I view my Visitor Stats?

3. What do "accesses" refer to in Wusage reports?

4. What do the terms in Wusage refer to?

5. Where can I find more information about Wusage?

6. What are Referrer logs?

7. How do I view Referrer logs?

NOTE: Wusage is also discussed in our Online Support Manual: Part 2 - Maintenance.

What is Wusage?
Wusage is a statistics system that helps you determine the true impact of your web site. By measuring the popularity of your documents (your site's content), as well as identifying the web sites that access your site most often, Wusage provides valuable marketing information. By determining the paths your users follow and analyzing the sites from which they come, Wusage helps you find out which outside sites are most important to you. Practically all organizations, whether commercial, educational or nonprofit, need solid numbers to make credible claims about their business on the Net. Wusage fills that need.

How do I view my Visitor Stats?
One of the directories you will find pre-installed within your www directory is named "wusage". This directory contains the access and stat files for your site. To access your personal wusage directory, proceed to http://www.YourDomainName.com/wusage. (You may also access your site statistics by logging into your Web Control Panel, and selecting Site Reports.) The web page displayed will contain all of the statistics for your domain for the previous week. The page will also contain a Weekly Reports link which, when accessed, will provide much more detailed statistics including pie charts and graphs. These reports are automatically updated for you daily and are always stored in the same place for easy comparison.

What do "accesses" refer to in Wusage reports?
An "access" is a single, successful request made by a web browser. Every successful request for any resource on the web server, whether for an image, document or another type of information resource, is regarded as an access. An "access" is not the same as a "unique" hit, which refers to the number of unique visitors.

What do the terms in Wusage refer to?
Below is a list of key references in Wusage and their meaning:

• Agents: An "agent," or user agent, is a web browser or other program used to access your web server. Most user agents are web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, but a significant number are automated Internet-indexing programs, such as operated by Altavista.
• Bytes: A "byte" is a single character, 8 bits, of information. In the reports generated by Wusage, the "bytes transferred" figure refers the number of characters of information that were sent to a browser. This is helpful in determining how much of the web server's connection to the Internet (how much bandwidth) is currently in use. It is especially useful to site administrators who pay for bandwidth by the megabyte or gigabyte on a regular basis.
• Trail: A "trail" is a unique path among the web pages on a site, followed by one or more visitors to the web server. Every visit to the web server follows a trail. Commonly followed trails represent useful information about the preferred routes that your visitors follow.
• Visit: A "visit" consists of one or more accesses made by the same visitor, with no more than a certain time interval between accesses.

Where can I find more information about Wusage?
More information is in our online support manual here, or you could visit the online manual at Boutell.com. Because we run Wusage in a shared hosting environment, you should look at the information pertaining to the Wusage config file for generating reports.

What are Referrer logs?
Referrer logs are extra entries in your access-log file telling you which site your visitors come from. By default, referrer logs are not included with most accounts, but may be added for a small extra monthly fee. When you add referrer logs, we also activate the agent logs for your domain which keep track of the type of browsers being used to access your site.

How do I view Referrer logs?
Referrer Logs become part of your main access log if you have added them as a option. When using Wusage, they will show up as [referrer] next to each file name listed on the report. Clicking on the link will bring up the referrer information.