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Access Logs & Statistics

Thursday
21May2009

What is Delicious?

Delicious (a Yahoo company) is a popular bookmarking service that lets people save and tag bookmarks. Squarespace's dashboard will display how many times your site has been saved on Delicious, as well as what tags people are using when they save your site.

See www.delicious.com for more information.

Thursday
21May2009

What do the entries in the access log mean?

Access log entries represent activity on your site. You can get a more detailed explanation of the format of each entry here.

Thursday
21May2009

I see a number of entries in my access log from one IP address, and they seem to be requesting my login page a lot. Is someone trying to hack me?

Probably not. Almost every time you see subsequent requests from one IP address that seem to be mechanical, you're seeing a search engine crawl your site. At times, search engine crawlers get confused and crawl some pages multiple times. Check the "user agent" of a particular access by clicking on it in your access log to check if the client is reporting itself as a bot.

In addition, if someone is actually trying to log in to your site, and fails, Squarespace will report a (Login Failed) message next to that particular hit.

Thursday
21May2009

Can I find out more about someone from their IP address?

It depends. An IP address is somewhat anonymous. From your access log, clicking on an individual access will pop up more information about that access. A hostname can sometimes be traced back to a dialup account, or a company (if you recognize the name of that company in the host name). Other things to look at are the "user agent", which reports the type of browser the person was using while that hit was made. This is a convenient way to tell if the hit came from a bot, or a person.

Thursday
21May2009

What is a unique visitor?

Squarespace defines a unique visitor as a unique IP within a particular time segment. The time segment tracked depends on the view you have selected within the access log overview page. For example, if you are looking at a day view, the unique counts for each hour are taking into account IPs tracked during that particular day.

Thursday
21May2009

Are unique visitors the same as unique people?

No. There is no accurate method of tracking people visiting your web site. Instead, your unique visitor count can give you a rough approximation of how many people may be visiting your site. See this excellent post at the Omniture Blog (an enterprise analytics company) citing 15 reasons why your unique visitor counts calculated from web traffic won't be accurate.

Thursday
21May2009

If unique visitor counts are so inaccurate, what good are they?

Just because the number doesn't correlate exactly back to actual unique people doesn't imply that it's not useful. You can still use the count to track the relative success of your site over time. For instance, if in April you receive 1,000 unique visitors, and in May you receive 2,000 -- it would be safe to assume that website your traffic actually did double -- even if it might have doubled from ~800 (or ~1,200) actual, real people to twice that number.

Thursday
21May2009

Can I exclude my own hits from my traffic statistics?

Yes. You can exclude yourself by IP address by adding an entry within [Members & Access > IP Access Filters] in your site manager. You can locate your IP address quickly by visting this site.

Thursday
21May2009

Why is Squarespace reporting a different number of visitors than my other analytics service?

Different services use different methods to track hits to your site.  This article is our favorite explanation of reasons why numbers don't match up across different statistics tools.