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Overview
Sawmill reports on your web site activity. As a User of Sawmill you will have access to the following areas:
Sawmill creates reports for you on-demand, so when you want to look at a report, you are seeing the most up to date information Sawmill knows about. Sawmill can be configured to update the reports whenever you want (you need to contact your Sawmill Administrator to change this) but typically they are updated daily. Sawmill's reports are on-demand and are created when you click on the "Show Reports" link. This allows you to "drill down" into the reports by selecting only those parts of the data you are interested in. The process of selecting only parts of the data is called "Filtering" in Sawmill and you have a number of Filter options to choose from. To find out about how to use the Sawmill filters, see Filters
Sawmill Filters can be used to break down the reports into manageable chunks, for example, to see all traffic for a given visitor or all traffic on only one of your domains. By breaking down the reports into different types of data you are able to use Sawmill to answer some of your questions.
Examples of the types of questions you might have are:
 Who is coming to your site? - the domains they're coming from (or just the IP addresses) and if your visitors login then their login username as well. The things Sawmill can show about your visitors is limited to the IP address and domain, the username and the geographic location that the IP address or domain is registered in. If your users login to your web site and they have provided further information about themselves to you, then it might be possible to incorporate that information into the Sawmill reports, but this will need to be done by your Sawmill Administrator. |
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Where are they coming from? - Sawmill can show you the geographic location of your visitors (by country and city). |
What are they looking at? - the sites, folders, and pages they're visiting, the images they're viewing, the scripts they're accessing and more. Sawmill can show you all the pages that have been viewed on your site, not just the top ten, use the Row Numbers section of the report to see more rows. You can also view the page they looked at by clicking on the  icon next to each URL. |
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When are they visiting? - which days got the most traffic, how your traffic is growing over time, which weekdays and hours are peak, and more. |
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What are they doing? - where they enter the site (the Entry Pages report), which paths they take through the site (the Session Paths report) and where they leave (the Exit Pages report). |
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How long do they stay? - which pages keep people the longest, and how long they stay on the site before leaving. Sawmill can show you how long visitors are looking at your web site and how long they look at individual pages on your site, use The Session Overview and The Session Views for this. |
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Who brought them? - where they found the link that brought them to your site, whether it was a search engine (if it was, what they searched for in the search engine), an advertisement, a link on some other web page or if they came directly to your site. For more info, see the Referrers report. You can also visit the site that brought them by clicking on the icon next to each one. |
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What are they using to browse? - which operating systems and web browser they're using. It is also possible to find out what the screen resolution and screen depth is of your visitors screens, this can be set up by your Web developer and your Sawmill Administrator. |
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Which are links broken? - which pages that were requested on your site that are no longer available, or were never available. |
For more detail about how to interpret the reports, see Understanding the Reports.
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