Livestats - Statistics Package

LiveStats is a fully comprehensive graphical web statistics package that can show you exactly who, where and when people are visiting your web site. Note the Who's On is not functional.

LiveStats comes with its own on-line help pages. However, below are some explanations of what the data means and how to get around the wealth of data available.

NB: Livestats can be password protected at any level , enabling you to allow third parties to see any , part or none of your stats.

Hits verses Sessions

Many sites rely on hit counters to measure the number of visitors. However, this is by no means an accurate way of measuring site traffic. Hits can be registered every time the refresh button is clicked on the browser or when a visitor returns back to the page being measured. This overestimates the volume of traffic.

LiveStats uses a more accurate approach by counting sessions, i.e. individual user visits, cataloguing length of user visits, which pages they have visited and which browser they viewed your site on.

The wealth of data available on LiveStats can be rather daunting at first, but once you get to grips with the volume of information you will be able to see exactly how well your web site is performing.

What's on LiveStats

Automatically, LiveStats will present data relating to the current week you are in (Sunday to Saturday). So if you click the Usage by option by clicking the icon, a further set of options will appear. Click Analysis and you will see all the general usage statistics relating to the current week.

The Date Selection option allows you to change the data period you wish to view. You can choose any week, month or a range using the supplied calendar.

Summaries

Full analytical breakdown of the number of sessions served, page usage, browser and platform usage, referrer activity - where are your visitors coming from and who were there sessions by - where do your visitors come from.

This is the place to start to understand your statistics! We recommend you print this page to get a good understanding of what the numbers mean.

From the Summaries section you can take a deeper look at the various areas analysed by LiveStats.

Usage by

The analysis page repeats the data presented in the summary.
Sessions - a graphical presentation of the number of people who have visited in the time period you have selected against an historical average.. It also shows a 365 day history.
Hits - yes hits are still reported but against the number of sessions.
Page Views - how many pages are being viewed by your visitors.
Kilobytes - how much data is being transferred to your visitors in total.
Session Time - who long are your visitors staying on your site.
Bytes/Sessions - similar to Kilobytes but shows the information against sessions.
Hits/Sessions - a further breakdown of visitor hits and sessions.

Pages by

The analysis page repeats the data presented in the summary.
Usage Map is not active
Page Views - shows all pages that have been viewed in numerical order.
Downloads - states which (if any) files have been downloaded from the site
Download Errors - indicates the number of download errors.
Least Views - pages viewed in least popular order.
Entry Point - which page did visitors enter the site at.
Exit Point - at which page did the visitor leave the site.
Viewed Once - pages that were only viewed once by a visitor during the measured period.
Time Spent - How long did visitor stay on each page (in seconds).
Page Errors - Shows errors such as bad links or missing pages.
Directory - page hits by site directories (where applicable)

Browsers by

The analysis page repeats the data presented in the summary.
Agent Type - what kind of web browsers being used by visitors.
User OS - what operating system visitors use (i.e. Windows, NT etc.).
Browser Tag - shows all variants of browser/operating system used.
New Tags - New browser tags identified.

Referrers by

The analysis page repeats the data presented in the summary.
URLs - List of all referrals made to your site from another site (links, search engines etc.)
New URLs - List of new referrals identified.
Domains - Top domains that have referred visitors to your site.
Search Eng - Search Engines used to find your site.
Keyword - Keywords used to find your site.

Sessions by

The analysis page repeats the data presented in the summary.
Net Identity - Identity of network used to visit your site.
Net Location - Geographical location of visitors.
Machine ID - Individual visitor computer ID by IP address.
It is worth noting that location and machine ID can be misleading and is dependant on whether user has a static IP address. Most Internet Service Providers do not support static IP.