Ron Woodall ([EMAIL PROTECTED]; Monday, October 28, 2002 3:35 AM):
>>There are many many ways in which rules like that one miscount things. >>The most common problem is that AOL uses proxy clusters. Each "true >>visit" results in hits on your server from perhaps ten different hosts >>(all part of a single cluster). If most of your visitors are AOL users, >>your so called visit counts would be six to ten times what the "real" >>number would be. Similar problems come up with user counting. > I have undertaken the philosophy of running Analog with a window > of 24 hours. This gives me a report in which all repeat visitors in that 24 > hours would be counted (hopefully) as a single visit. Although it doesn't > match your specification, it is adequate for my purposes. As Jason pointed out, there are many ways in which we can invent rules to define a visit. You just need to be aware of what you are counting and understand that it may not correlate to any real-world visit count. > AOL is one of the lessor organizations that requests pages from my > site. In September they only requested 4846 pages. I can only assume that > the page request is accurate. However, your point that AOL uses proxy > clusters should cause my "Distinct Hosts served" figure to be inflated. > Yet, when I view the "Host Report" AOL doesn't even show up > and I've increased the count down to 1 page (delivered?). If 'aol.com' shows up in the Organization report, some of the hosts MUST show up in the Host Report. AOL may have 4,846 different proxy servers, but that seems pretty high. You should be getting more than one request each. In fact, it's likely that all your requests will be spread across a dozen or two servers, so they should show up at least in the 200+ page request range. > However, when I ran the report down to that level, aol gets 304s > extensively. Is analog counting this as a "visit?" Analog doesn't count visits; it counts successful requests. 304's are usually not counted as successful. You can change this behavior with the 304ISSUCCESS command: http://analog.cx/docs/include.html#304. > How about all of the other requests made from those caching proxies? > I can't tell (if you can tell me how) if all of these requests are > being made from one individual or multiple people getting cached > pages and the proxy is only checking occationally for updates. There is no way to tell unless you have some access to the proxy machine. And even then you can't tell whether the requests to those proxy machines are from different accounts or one account unless the proxy machine also records the log-in information from AOL users. And even then, you could have several users using the same AOL account. This is why Analog strays from trying to define quantities related to real-world values. It counts data from your web server logs files. It can't tell you if or how that correlates to users. -- Jeremy Wadsack Wadsack-Allen Digital Group +------------------------------------------------------------------------ | This is the analog-help mailing list. To unsubscribe from this | mailing list, go to | http://lists.isite.net/listgate/analog-help/unsubscribe.html | | List archives are available at | http://www.mail-archive.com/analog-help@;lists.isite.net/ | http://lists.isite.net/listgate/analog-help/archives/ | http://www.tallylist.com/archives/index.cfm/mlist.7 +------------------------------------------------------------------------
