User Guide: Managing The Log and Upgrading your Account

Each website tracked by WebVisitor.info has two logs where visitor tracking data is stored:

This document will outline both of these logs, how they are used to generate reports and how you need to manage the space in the Website Session Log to ensure that the visitor statistics reporting you require can be achieved.

The Website Day Log

The Website Day log stores summary information for each day the website is tracked; this is total page request, total number of unique visitors and the total number of return visitors. This information can be interrogated using the Traffic Analysis Reports and is also used to render the All Websites Traffic graphics you see when you log in and Website Traffic seen on the Website Tracking home page:

Example: The All Projects Timeline, found on your Home page is rendered using the Website Day Log.

As this is actually a tiny amount of information to store, just a couple of number counters per day, there is no size limits placed on the Website Day Log for each website you are tracking. So you can return in 20 years each and of your websites will have records for every day in that period (excluding any reasonable changes we might make to WebVisitor.info in that time of course!).

The Website Session Log works differently though ...

Website Session Log

The Website Session Log stores detailed information for every visitor session made to your tracked website, each Session taking up one Log Entry.

For each Session the following is stored:

1. The overall Session details; visitor location, web-browser, screen-resolution, number of pages requested, start and end times for the session, operating system and also referrer information, such as referring links and search terms used.

2. The list of all the pages that were requested during that Session. You can see all the details recorded in one Log entry by looking at the Session Activity report and picking a Session.

The majority of the detailed reports use data pulled directly from this log, for example:

• Visit Length: the visit length from each of the Session is pulled together and collated into the Website Visit Length Report.
  
  
• Keyword Analysis: If a visitor found your website via a search engine, the keywords used are stored in that session’s log entry. The Keyword Analysis report pulls this data out to render the Website Keywords Report.
  
  
• Popular Pages, Entry Pages and Exit Pages: The page requests that made during each session are stored in the Log entry for that session. The popular pages, entry pages and exit pages report use this data to render.
  
  
• Country and City report: The geographical location of the visitor is stored in the log. This is pulled out when any of the geographical reports, such as ‘By Country’, ‘By Country and City’ or ‘World Map’ are rendered.
  
  

Storing Session and Page Request data for each visitor takes up a lot more space and also requires greater server resources, processing cycles, server RAM etc, to perform the visitor analysis performed by WebVisitor.info. Therefore the size of the Website Session log is restricted, with the restrictions based on the account type you have.

Each website tracked gets 100 free Session Log entries. If the Website Session log becomes full the new entry replaces the oldest entry, therefore the reports will always show you the latest information. For personal and low traffic websites having data for the last 100 sessions is more than sufficient and so using the free (advertising funded account) from WebVisitor.Info is a excellent way to get a professional website tracking solution for no cost.

However busy websites can receive hundreds, thousands or even millions of unique visitors each day. To cater for these you will need to expand the size of the Session Log and to do this, you need to upgrade your account.

Upgrading your account can be only be performed by Administrators and is done by going to the “Company Account” -> “Account Services” menu option. There you will find the upgrade packages that are currently on offer from WebVisitor.info and details of any special deals currently running.

Website Log manager

When you have upgraded your account your account will be credited with additional Session Log space, then use the Website Log Manager to allocate this additional Log space to the websites you are tracking as you wish.

The Website Log Manager can only be used by Administrators and is found in the “Websites – Website Log Manager” menu option.

For more information about the Website Log Manager, click here to go to the Website Log Manager help documentation.