List of Terms - Bitrix Site Manager - Content Management & Portal Solutions

List of Terms
Hit Session Host Visitor Event Referring page Search phrase Search engine	Search engine hit UserAgent Stop list record Advertising campaign Entry point Exit point Site path Site path section

Hit

A hit is one download of a page. The following actions also result in generating a hit:

clicking a link and the consequent page loading;
page reload done with F5 or Ctrl+F5;
navigating to a erratic page (producing error 404).

Session

A session in the Bitrix Site Manager is interpreted as the PHP session. A session is opened at the time of the visit start and is terminated after the browser window is closed. Also, a new session is opened upon the user authorization (logging in) and is closed with the user session termination (logging out). Terms session and visit are identical. In other words, a session is a visit to the site.

Host

A host means the IP address of the site visitor. The Bitrix Site Manager implies various levels of uniqueness for hosts in different reports.

The Statistics section displays the number of unique hosts (IP addresses) per day and the number of unique hosts for all the time of gathering the statistics (that is, since the module has been installed).

Advertising campaigns considers the IP address uniqueness within one advertising campaign only. All visitors under the advertising campaign and their IP addresses are stored in a special table. A visitor or the corresponding IP address is unique within this table only. Most of the existing statistical systems imply that the maximum deviation between the number of hosts and visitors of 10%. The Bitrix Site Manager Statistics module offers the unexampled deviation level of 3%.

Visitor

A visitor is the unique ID attached to any browser and saved in a cookie (a file that may be stored locally on a client side containing information pertinent to a particular site).

If a browser (or other web content retrieving software) does not accept or support inter-session or session cookies, a special method of the visitor identification is used instead. The specific visitor is recognized by applying a hash function (md5 ) to a range of environment variables peculiar to this very user: IP address, browser settings, provider settings and other parameters peculiar to this very user at the time of visit.
To put this another way, a visitor is a browser or other software connected to a site.

The Statistics module implies various levels of the visitor uniqueness.

The Statistics summary subsection displays the number of unique visitors per day as well as the number of unique visitors for all the time of gathering the statistics (that is, since the module has been installed).

Advertising campaigns uses the same uniqueness rules for visitors as applied to hosts, that is within one advertising campaign.
In both cases,new visitors are visitors that hit the site for the first time.

Event

An event can be described as any action that occurs either inside or outside the site. The Statistics module gathers information on those events only that had been presumed and programmed by the web programmer originally (see the Events topic in the SDK help section). The following are the examples of events: file download, transfer to an external pay system, order payment, order cancellation, banner click, leaving the site using a link to some other resource on your site, jumping to some page of your site.

Referring page

A referring page or referring site is any web resource having pages with links to your site. If a visitor hits your site using the link on a page like that, the site and page address are stored in the Statistics module and from now on considered referring.

Search phrase

If a visitor enters the search phrase on some search engine, found your site in the search results and clicked on it, the visitor will navigate to your site. This is the case that the visitor hits your site using the search phrase . All visits with search phrases are tracked in the Statistics module and displayed in the Search keywords subsection. In addition to the search phrase, the system stores the referring site and page, which is in fact the address of the search engine page containing search results.

Search engine

A search engine is any search engine in the Internet. For example: Google, Altavista, Yahoo, etc. Any search engine has the following characteristics:

own UserAgent string identifying the search engine robot;
group of domains (addresses of sites available for search requests);
variable containing a search phrase.

Search engine hit

A search engine hit is the case of indexing a page. All search engines have a set of tools for indexing the Internet resources. The process of indexation is accomplished by so-called search robots. Each robot is uniquely identified by its UserAgent. When the robot tries to index a page on your site, it sends a request to a web server and then loads the HTML code of the page and analyzes its contents. The Statistics module records such page downloads as the search engine hit . The search robots are distinguished by their UserAgent's.

UserAgent

A UserAgent is in fact the contents of the HTTP field UserAgent . The field is provided by the software communicating with a web server. Examples of such software are web browsers, download managers, offline browsers, search robots, etc. The software uses this field to identify itself during the communication. Please note that the contents of this field can be easily changed in many cases, many applications provide interface for doing it (for example, download manager FlashGet).

Sample UserAgent strings

NetCaptor web browser:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; NetCaptor 7.0.2 Final; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)

ReGet download manager:

ReGet SE version 1.3.1*

Stop list record

Stop list is a set of parameters used to filter out visitors and apply the prescribed action: redirect, show a message, fail to provide the site content, etc.

Advertising campaign

The Statistics module provides the mechanism to register certain threads of the site visitors. Such threads can be identified by a range of characteristic:

One or two parameters in the link to your site:referer1 and referer2. The following is an example of such a link: http://www.bitrixsoft.com/?referer1=bsm&referer2=doc.
Search engines that forward the visitors to the site.
Wildcards of any referring page(s).
Wildcards of any pages on your site that the visitors open.

The system records the following parameters for each of the visitor threads:

Sessions
Hits
Visitors
New visitors
Visitors who added the site to Favorites
All events initiated by the advertising campaign visitors.

The advertising campaign reports show two indices for these parameters:

Direct hit under an advertising campaign
On-return hit under an advertising campaign.

A direct hit under an advertising campaign is the session opened when a visitor is identified as the advertising campaign visitor. That is, if you click on the linkhttp://www.bitrix.ru/?referer1=bsm&referer2=doc, a session will open upon your visit and you will be identified as the visitor under advertising campaignr1:bsm; r2:doc. You are treated as the direct-hit visitor under the advertising campaign as long as the session is open.

A return under an advertising campaign is the consecutive session opened for a visitor after they have previously maid a direct-hit visit under this advertising campaign. That is, if you have done a direct hit under an advertising campaign and no attempts has been made later to enter the site under other advertising campaigns, all consecutive visits will be treated as returns under the advertising campaign of the direct visit.

Entry point

If you have just opened the browser window and typed any address within your site, this address will be considered the entry point to the site. In other words, an entry point is a first hit in a session.

Exit point

Generally, when you enter the site you view one or more pages. The last page that you viewed is the exit point. In other words, an exit point is the last page in a session.

Site path

A site path is a set of one or more pages that the visitor was consequently opening using the links on these pages. A path may branch thus making up several paths if a visitor opens more than one page from the source page. The Microsoft ^®Internet Explorer allows doing so by selecting the command Open in a New Window in the context menu or by holding the Shift key down while clicking on links.

Site path section

The Statistics module considers a site path section is a set of pages which consists of the first page and an arbitrary number of the consequent pages of the path.

Example

You enter the site to a page a, click on the link to a page b to open it, and then click on the link to a page c. So, you made a single site path consisting of the three sections:
page a;
page a -> page b ;
page a -> page b -> page c .
But if you, holding the Shift key, open pages d and e from the page c, both in new windows, you will make two paths. Both paths will consist of the four sections, and the first three sections in these paths will be identical.