I have a plan 6 virtual hosting account wth Tera-Byte, and this is served on a Cobalt RAQ4. On the site administration pages I login to, there is a section called "Site Usage".

I'm hoping to put some affilitiate banner advertising on my site in the coming weeks when I re-launch it with vBulletin forums, but how do I properly ascertain the number of daily impressions my site receives?

For the last 24 hour period snapshot, I see the following information:-

Number of Computers Requesting Content = 509
HTML Page Requests = 461
Bad Requests = 1
Total Requests = 9145
Distinct Files Served = 524

Now pardon my ignorance, but am I correct in presuming that the first figure (509) is the number of unique hits my site has had, while total requests (9145) is the number of page impressions I have received in the last 24 hours?

I am curious to know how I prove to the likes of EngageMedia or DoubleClick how many impressions my site receives per month? Furthermore, is there a reliable and free tool I can install on my site for the purpose of accurately measuring impressions and presenting this information to affiliate networks?

Help please!

If they ask for any sort of confirmation, it will probably come in the form of wanting raw log files. If I were you I'd run your logfile through something like analog which will tell you how many requests were made for each individual page.

Ah-ha! Thanks very much for that cperciva! I've downloaded Analog, along with the web.log file from my site - so now I have some juicy stats to really sink my teeth into!!!

Maybe you could tell me which of the figures below represents my monthly impressions? (I've filtered out things like data transfer). I would assume it was successful requests for pages? Am I correct? So that would mean that even though my site was only open for two weeks of the last four, I have had appoximately 31,138 impressions? If so, that's pretty encouraging for when I finally open officially!

Successful requests: 79,646 (48,947)
Average successful requests per day: 17,036 (6,992)
Successful requests for pages: 31,138 (18,689)
Average successful requests for pages per day: 6,660 (2,669)
Distinct files requested: 8,180 (2,884)
Distinct hosts served: 6,640 (4,991)

Any advice offered would be most appreciated.

Not necessarily. I'm not entirely certain what analog counts as "pages"... (\me checks on analog's website) ... ok, it looks like that is .html, .htm, and .asp requests. Unless you're doing wierd things (having asp serve up images, for example) then yes that is probably the number of page views. (If you have pages generated by .pl, .php, or .cgi you might want to add those into the relevant configuration option so that the "requests for pages" will count those as well).