Website Statistics Report: Recent Page Requests

Overview

The Recent Page Request Activity report is the best way to tell what’s happening on your website now. It shows pages each page request made in the last hour (expandable up to 48 hours) and the Session that it was associated with. A handy refresh button is provided for those of you who wish to monitor your site traffic like a hawk!

If you find this report useful you should also look at the Session Activity report which aggregates this data into a Session by Session view, click here to read about this.

The report lists each Page Request made during the duration of the time period for the report. Unlike most other reports the most recent page request is shown first, with older page requests following on in subsequent rows.

For each Page Request the following items are shown:

• Time of the Page Request
• The Session ID, or the Identified Visitors name if you are using this feature. You can click on this to view the full Session details
• The visitor page request number. This is the request number for that particular visitor.
• The title of the page requested.
• The visitor’s web-browser. Name shown only, not the version. To find this out click on the Session ID to drill into the whole session details.
• The Country and City, if they are known of this visitor.

Identifying Visitors

The usefulness of this report can be greatly enhanced by setting up “Identified Visitors” so that visitor sessions are identified by the visitor’s actual name.

By default WebVisitor.info will generate a random and unique identifier for each visitor, for example “Visitor: 879da4c9-1e43-455f” can be setup to show Visitor: Gerry McNicol (ID, 2100) and this is a much friendlier way of viewing your website statistics.

Setting up Identified Visitor Tracking is explained fully in the Code Installation Guide.

Report Options

There are two options available with this report.

The first is to set the period the report is for. This report shows Pages Request in order of most recent first. By changing the report period you can set how far back in time you want to see. By default this is set for the last hour, but you can change it to go back 48 hours in time.

The section option, which is enabled by default, renders the pages requests from each session in the same colour. Each Session is rendered in a different colour. This is very useful for picking users sessions out from the page request list (as they are shown in order of time). Because the colours are randomly created the result can occasionally be a little garish, so if you find you need to tone it down a little there is an option for showing the results list in the usual colour grid.

How this Report Works with the Log

To understand how to get best use of this report read Managing Website Session Log help document.

Optimising your site for this Report

This report requires no special treatment to get the best out of it other than the standard bullet points of …

• Ensure that the tracking code is placed on every page of your site
• Ensure that your log is as big as possible.