Viewing Web Stats with AwStats
AWStats is a powerful, feature-rich tool that generates graphical statistics of your website. This comprehensive analyzer provides detailed information on your visitors, hits and pages as well as search engines, broken links and much more. The key to benefitting from AwStats is knowing what all these numbers really mean. This tutorial will give you a better understanding of the many statistics you’ll find within the program.
While the statistics have some depth to them, AwStats is a straightforward application that allows you to access everything from a centralized interface. After selecting a domain you want to view stats for, the statistical categories you will find are “Unique Visitors”, “Number of Visits”, “Pages”, “Hits”, and “Bandwidth.”
Unique Visitors – This represents the number of total visitors by unique IP address. Unique visitors are a little tricky. For example, dial-up visitors may have a different IP address every time they visit your site. This would give you a unique hit even when it comes from the same visitor.
Number of Visits – This is the total number of visits for your site over a given time period.
Pages – This shows you the total number of your web pages that have been viewed by visitors. Images, CSS and Javascript are not included. Only HTML and CGI file types.
Hits – This refers to each file requested by a visitor. It includes both pages and images together. If you have a single page with two photos calling a Javascript file, that page will generate a total of 4 hits. Though often the most referenced web statistic, the number of hits is basically meaningless.
Bandwidth – This shows the total number of Kbytes transferred. If you one of your web pages has 50 KB of text with 2 images at 25 KB each, every person who visits that page will consume 100 KB of bandwidth.
The stats above are given over a 30-day period, a 7-day period and hour-by-hour.
Additional Statistics
The next statistical categories are as follows:
Visitors Domains/Countries (Top 25) – Displays what countries visitors originated from.
Hosts (Top 25) – Provides a list of the top individual visitors on your site.
Robots/Spider Visitors (Top 25) – Shows what search engines visited your site and when they last visited.
Visits Duration – Tells you how long visitors stayed on your site.
Files/Type – Shows which of your files are getting the most hits.
Pages-URL (Top 25) – Shows you the pages that are visited the most on your site.
Operating Systems (Top 10) – Shows the type of operating systems used by your visitors in order of popularity.
Browsers (Top 10) – Similar to the OS category, this one shows the browsers used by your visitors in order of popularity.
Connect to Site From – This is a category that shows where your visitors originated from, displaying stats that range bookmarks to search engines.
Search key phrases/words (Top 10/25) – Shows the top 10 key phrases and top 25 keywords used to find your site.
Miscellaneous – Shows miscellaneous data such as the type of features supported by browsers
HTTP Error codes – Displays codes that gave hits or traffic yet were not included in other charts.
Conclusion
AwStats makes viewing and analyzing your web statistics incredibly easy. You can select the month you want to view details on from the drop-down box at the top of the page and on the left side of the page there is an extensive menu that allows you to navigate directly to a specific statistical category.
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