Re: visits vs. hits

Chris Luther (cluther_at_earthsky.com)
Thu, 25 Jul 1996 13:00:28 -0500

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I have been reading this visits vs. hits topic with some interest. As the
producer of a radio show that provides internet content (Earth & Sky) I am
interested in how our radio audience compares to our internet audience, and
how they overlap.

There is a tool which I have developed that helps me analyze and chart our
log files based upon the frequency a particular IP address visits our site.
I realize the limitations of this analysis (see below) but it does provide
me a metric that I can use in evaluating how effective we are in building a
www audience.

I wrote this program solely for my own use. I'm even a little shy about
releasing it to the world; there are probably numerous ways I can and will
improve it. But I felt that it "might" be of benefit as is to some who
have written in recently.

Sincerely,

Chris Luther cluther_at_earthsky.com
Byrd & Block Communications, Inc. http://www.earthsky.com
PO Box 2203 v: (512) 477-4441
Austin, TX 78768 f: (512) 477-4474
___________________________________________________

WWWVisitors

WWWVisitors is a hack of a program which permits me to do analysis of
"unique hosts" to my site rather than an analysis of
files sent (which is the focus of most other www analysis
shareware/freeware programs I've seen).

It is a Microsoft Excel 5.0 workbook with macro which processes all the
HTML Log files that are within a particular directory.
(This directory can be changed in the initial dialog). The works on log
files produced by our Appache server, which I understand
are a standard format for most UNIX/NT web severs. It does not work with
Webstar or MacHTTP log files (why they chose to
use a different log file structure I will never know).

The questions I wished answered were:

During a time period how many people were visiting my site.
How many were return visitors and how frequent were their returns.

With this analysis I can gauge how successful my site is in building an
audience.

This program makes the assumption that each person is represented by a
unique IP address. Admittedly this assumption has its
limitations, because some people may share an individual computer and
people who visit the site over a SLIP/PPP connection
most often have IP address that change. If you expect that many of your
visitors are visiting from home connections using
PPP/SLIP then these frequency numbers will vastly undercount this audience.

You can pick it up at ftp://ftp.earthsky.com/pub/misc/wwwvisit.sit

This is a Stuffit compressed file.

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