Website Statistics Interpretation

[UK2004]

When you looka t visitor stats to your site, it has a section Usage by Country for the given month. Where it says US COmmercial is that actual US based visitors or is it mostly people who's computers go through US Servers but are UK based users? I wander as our UK visitors is 17% at present, interested to hear exactly what these stats mean.

Many thanks.

[Rhyl Lightworks]

Me too
Barrie

[Chris Uren]

I await some enlightened replies to this myself

Chris:)

[openmind]

You may well find that a lot of AOL visitors are shown as US visitors down to teir IP address allocation

[Vickycgc]

We have a stats package that also shows usage by country and ours was showing UK: 8% and US commercial: 58% so I queried this with our web designer. If a visitors IP address ends with .com it registers this visit as US Commercial.
Hope this explains it a little more.

[UK2004]

Oh I see, do many UK visitors ip end in .com as that would explain it!

[openmind]

An IP address does not have a domain extension it is just a bunch of numbers indicating where the host connection is. As I mentioned above though AOL IP addresses do give a false indicator.

Sysems such as MaxMind give a much indication of actual IP location...

[dugu]

To my site, it sais unresolved to 59%. What does it mean 'unresolved', the server couldn't get the ip adress of the visitors?

[openmind]

No it will mean that it couldn't correctly identify where the IP address was located. Getting the IP is the easy part, determining the location is more tricky...

[Tin]

<<< Moved to IT & Internet >>>

[pdecaux]

I have absolutely no affiliations with this product, but I can recommend using StatCounter on your website. It provides some excellent and detailed statistics and, for smaller sites, the service is completely free! The upgrade fees are entirely reasonable too.

According to them: "Our free service is aimed at websites with 250,000 pageloads per month or less and offers lifetime summary stats and a detailed analysis of your last 100 pageloads."

It appears to be pretty accurate in determining where people (or at least their ISPs) are from, at least at a country level. I am not allowed to post links yet, but it is at statcounter.com.