Interpreting Analog Data Reports

At Bluesdejour.com we use a program from England by Stephen R. E. Turner called Analog 6 which allows us to better imagine what sort of traffic we have. We use the program to gather data for individual pages, groups of pages, & songclips.

We Analog 6.0 twice for each report: The 1st run yields data representing "requests" &
"unique page views"; The 2nd yields data representing what we call "visits". [Methods]
Analog 6.0 presents its data in the form of stacked tables. We run our results through a word processor then copy the tables into a more compact form.

Analog 6.0 is a free and useful program that can be put to work in a couple of hours. It's lightweight to download and quick in its operation. It does not intermingle itself with your system folders. It presents useful data by default into both text and graphic displays which makes it difficult for important data chunks to go unnoticed. Easy to follow setup instructions are included with a well designed basic configuration file to get you going. Additional examples of configuration files are provided and well annotated allowing you to discover the program's potential and tinker with customization.

Analog 6.0 can be configured to yield data representing the webpages of individual artists. By considering the data from short term reports like "dailys" you can learn a little about who is interested in your music and if particular venues tend to generate more interest. By looking at long term reports like "monthlys" you can judge if a website is effective.

 Sample
 Report

Definitions & Methods

1. Requests - also know as "hits". It's the number of times a web page is accessed by online organisations. It could represent a person viewing the page, an ISP caching the page for viewing elsewhere, or a web bot gathering partial data.

2. Unique Page Views - It's the number of different online organisations accessing a page.

3. Visits - There is no reliable method for measuring actual visits nor clear definition about what a visit actually is. We're using the term to refer to the number of times a seperate image or script is accessed by the requested page. Ideally when a page is really visited the scripts upon the page call for images and menu scripts that pass from the website into the visitor's browser "cache" folder. When a once viewed page is again requested, the browser makes no additional request to the website for that page's support files but instead recalls them from its own local cache folder. If one of these images or scripts is unique to a particular page, a more conservative and perhaps more accurate figure can be had by marking one of these to represent actual "Visitors." But this number can undershow "Visits" since some visitors (or their ISPs) may retain a script or image within their browser's cache all day, all week, if not forever.

4. Plays - some music files, like SWFs, pass down to the visitor's cache folder. They begin to play almost immediately. If play is stopped, the result is a partial download. We can know the gross volume of kilobytes which pass from our website down to all the cache folders of all our visitors, the number of times a particular clip was called plus the percent of our gross volume that resulted from those calls . & Since we know the kilobyte volume of the song clip.... we can do the math. We think that the download of all a clip's kilobytes represents an actual play: Since an SWF song clip begins to play quickly before it loads completely, we think that if it does load completely the visitor must have listened to at least 3/4ths of the clip.

5. Starts - When Mp3s are "streamed", the music file itself does not pass down from the website to the visitor's computer. Therefore we can only know that the actual play of the Mp3 clip most likely began. On the other hand a visitor can store the MP3's initiator file, it's M3u, on their hard drive and play the clip unbeknownst to us whenever they wish. Many people do this, especially those with high speed connections.

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