Daily activity

This graphics shows the daily activity for the specified visitor type (human and non-human) and for the server. The following information are displayed:

The visitor time zone is taken into account (for the server daily activity, the server timezone is used). If your site is dedicated to a local audience, you should usually see peaks at working hours (depending of the site content). If your site is dedicated to a global audience, it should be flatter.

Difference between human and non-human visitors

There is a lot of differences in the visitors behaviour, depending if there are human or non-human. Human activity tends to be at working hours (about 08:00 to 17:00), when Non-human activity tends to be spread on the full day (some non-human visitors are friendly enough to work more at night that during human working hours, in order not to overload your server). Both activity are combined in the server activity.

In general, human activity is more important that non-human activity.

Most of non-human visitors are looking only for web pages (*.htm, *.html, *.jsp, etc.), not for their associated ressources (javascript code, images, etc.). Consequently, the non-human visitors will have have almost the same number of pages and hits (the slight difference is due for example to web site downloaders). Human visitors usually have a greater number of hits than pages, especially if your web site have a lot of images.

Usage:

The server daily activity graph can be used to regulate the server load. Examples: The daily activity of human visitors can be used to see if your visitors are coming during their working hours (probably at work) or if they are coming during their time-off (probably at home). Depending of your web site, their behaviour can be different whether they coming from home or work. Depending of the targeted audience, you can adapt your web site accordingly.

Technical details:

The daily activity graph is computed using the log record time for each hour. For human and non-human visitors, the time zone is taken into account (the visitor country is used to detect the time zone, according to the mappings defined in the geographic_database.xml file).

This detection method is not always precise especially for countries that uses several time zones (United States of America, Russia, Australia, etc.). For such countries, the country-to-timezone mapping of the geographic_database.xml file should be adapted to correspond to the most probable time zone of your visitors.

Another cause of error is the visitor country detection method. For example if your visitor comes from a proxy that is not in the same time zone than the visitor real time zone, or if your visitor comes from a satellite link.

see also: