Reports category difference between site visited and site requested
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Reports category difference between site visited and site requested

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Article ID: 171860

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Updated On:

Products

Cloud Secure Web Gateway - Cloud SWG

Issue/Introduction

Monthly reports the value for sites visited and sites requested are different.  What is the difference between the two?

Resolution

The count of unique Sites Visited is shown in the totals row of a site report and is based on the filter criteria of the report:  For the given filters and requested time range, it is the number of unique hostnames found in the data.

For each row of a summary report, Reporter counts requests, page views, and browse time (and also client bytes and server bytes).  

Example:

Requests, or hits, are a count of the actual number of web requests made to that site.  All requests from the log data are included in this count, even if they are combined with other requests in the database by the Page View Combiner.

Page views are an estimated count of the number of pages that were viewed for that site.  If a request has a content type of "text/html" and the server returns a status code of "200", Reporter counts a request as a page view.  Therefore, page view count is always lower than request count for a particular site, and depending on the specific web technology implemented on the site, may or may not be very accurate.

Browse time is also an estimate, based on the estimated page views.  It is an attempt to estimate the total amount of time that web users spend viewing pages on the site.  However, it is just an estimate and our log data does not actually provide any real information about whether a user was looking at a particular page that was requested or how long they actually spent looking at it.  The log data just tells us which requests were made and when they were made, and from that, the browse time counts are estimated.   For more information see the Reporting Section in our Tech Docs.