Downloads report
The report on downloads enables you to do quantitative analyses of file downloads, or access to target pages of a site, as a whole or by each refer, resulting in the visitor downloading a file.
Consolidated downloads report
The quantity of download traffic is defined in three various ways, reflected in the three columns of the report next to each file:
Complete downloads | Actual quantity of complete downloads of each file. The downloading is considered complete if the total size of the downloaded fragments of one file to a unique ip-address (during a 24 hr period) is equal to or greater than the size of the downloaded file. | Download hits | The number of unique visitors to a site who have started downloading, i.e. the number of unique ip-addresses from which a download was initiated ( the visitor pushed "start downloading the file" ) but without guarantee that the file was downloaded completely. | Traffic downloads | The number of downloads based on the volume of traffic on the selected file divided by the file size. This value correlates well with the number of complete downloads, and usually differs from it by at most 20%. |
In addition, two more parameters are calculated for each file: Total traffic | Total volume of traffic on each file. | File size | Size of the downloaded file. This value is calculated from the data on sizes of loaded files, which you can see in the File Sizes report available on the menu command: Tools | File sizes. |
Hosting quality
The relationship between the number of complete downloads, download hits and traffic downloads, as defined above, enables you to estimate the quality of your hosting. The relationship for a good hosting would be something like 90/97/100. i.e this hosting is completely acceptable. But in practice, the numbers may be quite different..
Discrepancy of statistics with other log analyzers
If you compare the numbers given you by the usual log analyzer with the number of downloads according to Download Analyzer, the discrepancy can be noted at once. However this means only one thing, that none of the usual log analyzers are intended for calculating the number of downloads. If, according to Webalizer, you have 100 downloads per day, then most likely the actual number is no more than 60 complete downloads.
Detailed report on download refers
The values of file downloads are not only outputted to the consolidated report on all files but are also defined for all direct and first refers and outputted into the detailed report on each file:
First refers | A list of first refers, the sites / pages from which visitors first arrived at your site, but subsequently, having visited the various pages of your site, have downloaded a file. | Direct refers | A list of direct refers, sites / pages from which a download was started directly. |
When a downloading is initiated from an external source, for example from some popular software archive, the archive visitor may not visit your site. In this case a Direct and First refer coincide. They may also coincide in many other cases. However, a First refer always gives information on the source of traffic resulting in a download, whereas a Direct refer gives information on where your file was downloaded from.
Filters
To calculate the download traffic for a particular period of time, you should use the date filter.
If there are quite a lot of files, then you should use the text filter on filename to select the files you need and to calculate the total traffic on the group of files (shown in status line). To rate traffic for individual groups of refers, use the text filter on refers. For example, all localized versions of the site google.com (google.it, google.fr, google.de..) have one common substring: google. Entering this into the field of the text filter on refers, you can filter out all other sites not included in the google.com family, and in this way rate the traffic of the remaining sites which do satisfy the filter.
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