How many hits does your web site get? For a long time this has been the benchmark to evaluate the success or failure of a web site. It is also a known fact, that ‘number of hits’ does not give a clear and true picture of the people’s view of the web site. A number of other parameters such as - which pages are most people friendly, which pages have been visited the maximum number of time, where surfers have spent the maximum time, what browser is being used, which pages were least persuasive, which other sites refer or are having links to the web site and many more are required to really find out the success of a web site. The web managers too like to have these statistics related to their web site to restructure and upgrade their web pages to suit the user requirements and for making sites more friendly & informative. The Web Site Traffic Analysis Service of NIC provides all these analysis and much more. Web Server Log Files All the web statistics mentioned above are available in the Web Server’s Log File, as each communication between a Client Browser and a Web Server results in an entry in the Web Server’s Log File. However, it is almost impossible to manually go through the Log file and get meaningful information out of it, as the Log file registers thousands of entries per hour and it is a tedious & time consuming task to filter out different statistics about a particular web site. The data recorded in Log Files
- Date of visit
- Time of visit
- IP address or domain name
- What pages did they visit?
- Any errors encountered
- Files downloaded
- Which browser was used.
- Which Web site has referred visitors to your web site, etc.
WebStat Service (http://webstat.nic.in) WebStat is a web-based service that uses the raw Log File data, analyzes it and converts it into meaningful information about the Web Site Traffic. It generates the daily, weekly, monthly & yearly traffic analysis reports of the Web Sites hosted on NIC Web Servers The application is user-friendly & the simple navigation structure helps in locating/ accessing the required reports quickly & easily. It helps in finding the number of visitors to the site, gives the report of frequently visited pages/folders/downloaded files, facilitates the exporting of reports in PDF, DOC, or any other formats, and the information is also displayed graphically showing activity by day of the week or time of day. Statistics based on hit analysis reports generated by WebStat
- Total number of hits, page-views & visits received by the site
- Top number of pages/folders/dynamic pages (asp/php/jsp/cgi/....) visited & downloaded files
- Top visitors & most active companies and other organizations visiting your web site
- Top geographic regions (Countries/Cities) of the visitors to the site
- Trends Analysis - displaying how many times a visitor has visited the web site, duration of visit as well as the visit trends
- Site performance reports like the Band-width usage (Kbytes transferred), average time to serve pages, etc.
- Details of successful & cached hits
- Error (failed hits) analysis report
- Top domains, Sites, Pages and IP addresses that refer visitors to your site
- Top search engines that referred visitors to the web site and the keywords & phrases used to search
How to avail WebStat Services? The service is available through the support center at http://webservices.nic.in and is based on a userid/passwd authentication mechanism. Web managers of sites, hosted on NIC Servers, can avail this service using the above mentioned methodology through their coordinators to access the in-depth hit analysis reports of their respective web sites. The webstat tool helps in making the websites more attractive to the surfers and will also help in content management and performance tuning of the websites. The web pages featuring the analysis reports have been enhanced using JavaScript/Java applet and one has to use Java-enabled browser at their end to see the reports.