AWStats – Introduction and hosting
AWstats is one of the most advanced free web statistics scripts available. It is available for download but instead of downloading and installing it I would recommend to find a web hosting firm that offers AWstats pre-installed. It’s a Perl script after all and installation can be a bit fiddly for the inexperienced user.
The following hosting firms have AWStats pre-installed: Bluehost, Hostgator, Hostmonster, HostICan, Lunarpages, Powweb.
If you host more than one domain on an account you can switch AWStats on for every domain through the Stats Manager in CPanel. For those who want to take a shot at installing AWStats on their local server or web server there are a few good links here.
For the rest of you who are still reading, I will introduce you to the main features and the AWStats output.
Summary: The summary field summarizes the number of unique visitors, the ratio of unique visitors/number of visits, the total pages viewed, the pages/visitors ratio and bandwidth used. AwStats also distinguishes between your human traffic and non-human traffic. The number of unique visitors is the main indicator for the traffic of a website. From the ratio which compares unique visitors to total visits you can see whether or not visitors are returning. Everything above one is good and means your site manages to encourage visitors to revisit your site. Getting close to two is the holy grail. The pages to visitor ratio is a good indicator as to what extent your visitor browsed your site. Obviously, if a visitor browses an average of 10 pages per visit your site is more interesting to your visitors than one which only gets 1.5 pages per visitor.
Monthly History: This section provides a monthly overview of unique visitors, number of visits, pages, hits, and bandwidth. In the bottom row you can also see the totals for the year. The ratios are not provided but can be easily computed.
Days of month: Gives you a breakdown of the aforementioned statistics by day of the month. Usually, I don’t find this very insightful. Only extreme daily changes will show up and can be explained. If you get a high traffic link, your server goes down etc.
Days of week: This section provides an overview of the average activity on each week day. The results may be slightly distorted as not every month is divisible by 7 and most of the time some days may occur more often than others. The activity can be useful for you to see when to announce a new feature (highest activity) or to schedule maintenance (during lower activity/server load).
Hours: Provides an overview of the average activity during the hours of the day. Again this is useful for technical staff for scheduling jobs on your site. Days of week and hours are both important to monitor the success of your marketing activities.
Countries: Shows you what countries your visitors are from. Be weary of visitors that don’t visit very often but use excessive bandwidth, and view a lot of pages. Those “visitors” may actually be malicious bots that steal content or perform other unwanted activities.
Hosts: A breakdown of your most frequent visitors by I.P. address. If you find something suspicious you can do an I.P. lookup which won’t be necessarily insightful but you can at least find out where their ISP is located.
Robots/Spiders visitors (Top 25): Spiders that visit your websites will show up here. The traffic is counted by hits (before the plus) and successful hits on robots.txt (after the “+” sign).
Visits duration: How long are you visitors staying on your site? The longer the better.
Files type: What files types where requested most? Could urge you to use smaller file if you’re using too much bandwidth. It may also indicate if someone is hot linking to your site.
Pages-URL (Top 25): Which ones of your pages are most frequently visited. The top rank is usually occupied by your home page. This section also provides the number of entries or exits of a particular page. If you have a high number of exits as a percentage of entries than the page in question is not doing a very good job at retaining your visitors and may need some extra attention.
Operating Systems (Top 10): A detailed analysis of the different operating systems used by your visitors. This can be used in conjunction with the browser report in order to optimize your site design.
Browsers: A list of the browsers used by visitors to access your site.
Connect to site from: This is one of my favourite reports within AwStats. First you can see what percentage of your visitors accessed your site through direct type in or bookmark. You can also see whether you have incoming links from search engines and other websites. The columns show you the hits and pages generated by these incoming links and what their percentage is based of the total of hits and pages.
Search Keyphrases and Keywords: The keyphrase would be a google search for “Cuban cigars” and the keywords are “Cuban” and “cigars”. This is a very helpful feature to assess how well you rank for certain keywords in the search engines. Compare this to the “links from search engines” to get an idea which search engines are providing your traffic.
Miscellaneous: Monitors whether your user’s browsers support certain media types. Although this is useful my columns always stay empty even though I’m pretty sure that a lot of my visitors have .pdf enabled for instance. So either my AwStats is not properly configured with regards to this section or something else is wrong here. Another very useful metric to gauge your site’s appeal to your visitors is the “Add to favourites estimated” which measures how many visitors out of the total bookmarked your site. This is a key retention indicator as this will most likely bring in repeat visits and help you build a solid and steadily growing traffic base.
HTTP Error codes: Here you can check what errors are occurring on your server and start to fix them. 404s are listed by URL so you can easily achieve zero 404s from your indexed or internal links. If someone performs false type ins then that’s beyond you of course. I also like to monitor if all of my 301 permanent redirects are working. For particular 301s you would use a redirection check tool but it’s nice to get a feeling for how often these redirects are taking place on your site.
By now you will have probably realised that Awstats is one of the best free stats tools available. If you go through the hassle of plugging some of the data into an excel sheet you can produce some really insightful graphs and get a really detailed understanding of what is taking place on your site and in your linking neighbourhood.
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