Web Sites and Ezine Design and Hosting
Analysis of Site Visitor Stats Using AWStats
Web site visitor Stats generally report on the number of visitors that are viewing your site. AWStats also reports "Unique Visitors", a quantity that advertisers use to determine the desirability of advertising on your website.Help with AWStat Reports
Some site owners prefer AWStats because it annual historical data, and clearly labeled data.Definitions: Visitors, Visits, Pages, Requests, and Bandwidth
The following definitions of the terms used in the AWStats reports will help you to interpret your website statistics. They are listed as they appear from top to bottom in the AWSTATS package.
Last Update: This tells you when your statistics were last updated. Generally they are updated every day at midnight.
Report Period: This is the month for the statistics you will see on this page. You may choose any month from when your account was updated.
Unique Visitors: The Unique visitors to your website are visitors with different IP addresses, in other words clicks to your website coming from different computers. If someone enters your website address 5 times this is counted as one unique visitor, and 5 visits.
Number of Visits: The number of visits to your website is the total amount of times people have visited your website. These may not be all from the same visitor, for example one person may have clicked on your website 10 times. To determine the total amount of people who have visited your website, look at your unique visitors figure.
Pages: This figure is the number of pages people have viewed on your website. Each time someone looks at a page on your website, this figure goes up by 1.
Hits: AWSTATS counts a "hit" whenever a resource is downloaded from your website by a visitor. This resource could be page text, a graphic, a javascript, a style sheet, a flash file etc. You should generally ignore this figure, because it tends to be largely misleading.
Bandwidth: This figure shows you the aggregate amount of data downloaded by your visitors.
Monthly History: This table shows you the summary table above this for each month of the current year. This allows you to compare each figure with previous months.
Days of the Month: This figure shows you the number of visits, pages, hits and bandwidth for the current month in a tabular and graphical form.
Days of the week: These figures allow you to determine the most popular day of the week that people visit your website, in terms of pages, hits and bandwidth.
Hours: The time of day people visit your website, again in terms of pages, hits and bandwidth.
Countries: This is where each visitor to your website is located. Again figures for pages, hits and bandwidth are listed.
Hosts: These are IP addresses of your visitors. Some services, such as cable companies, do not give individual IP addresses to each of their users. Therefore several visitors may visit from the same IP address.
Authenticated and/or anonymous users: If your have a section to your website where clients can login, then they will be listed under this section. Otherwise if Awstats cannot determine the IP address of a visitor, they may be listed in this section also.
Robots/Spiders Visitors: Robots and spiders are used by search engines such as Google or Yahoo to index your website.
Visits Duration: This tells you how long your visitors are staying on your website. At the top of the table you can see the average time for each user.
Files Type: In this table you can see what type of files people are downloading from your website. This could be helpful if you are interested in reducing the amount of bandwidth that your web site is using.
Pages: This section tells you which pages are being visited the most. It also tells you which page the user entered or exited your site. This could be helpful in reorganizing or tuning your site for more effective marketing.
Operating Systems: Here you can see what operating systems your visitors are using. Examples: Windows, Macintosh.
Browsers: The web browsers your visitors use to connect to your site.
Connect to site from: This table how your visitors found your website: (whether they directly entered your address into their web browser, or linked from a search engine, or linked from another website).
Search Keyphrases: This is a list of phrases people use to search for your website in search engines.
Search Keywords: This is a list of single words people use to search for your website in search engines.
Miscellaneous: The 'Add to Favorites' figure is an approximate value of the amount of visitors that have bookmarked your website in their browser.
HTTP Status codes: This is a list of unusual status codes that the web server sent to users of your web site. Status code 200, Resource found, is the normal status code sent with most successful requests. Status codes other than 200 mean something unusual has happened.
The most problematic status code is a 404, Resource not found. Visitors will get 404 they enter a resource on your website with a spelling error or link to a resource that no longer exists.
206 Partial content: means that part of a pdf document was transferred to a user that is reading the pdf a page at a time.
301 Moved parmanently: means that the visitor’s request was forwarded to a different web site address or different page address.
302 Moved temporarily: means that the visitor’s request was forwarded to a different web site address or different page address.
401 Unauthorized: means that a visitor has requested a resource that they are not authorized to view. The most common cause of this is specifying a link to a folder and not providing an index page inside the folder. For example:
http://yourdomain.com/famous_recipes/ rather than
http://yourdomain.com/famous_recipes/index.html403 Forbidden: means that the visitor has requested a resource that they are not allowed to view.
404 Resource not found: means that the visitor has requested a resource that does not exist on the site. This could be an invisible resource, such as a favicon graphic, or a visible resource such as a page or image.
Using the Stats Reports
We recommend that you review the status reports once a week. It may help you correlate increases in visits with your marketing activities. You will probably see an increase in visits on the day following media coverage, or mention a website feature in your newsletter.Pay particular attention to the pattern of visits to your pages. Your home page may receive far more visits than any of your other pages. If so, you might want to devise a strategy to either encourage more people to visit other pages, or bring more of your crucial content forward to the home page.
Also notice who is referring to your website. You might conclude that you need a campaign to create more referring pages at search engines, registries, and othe sites on the web.
Glance at your error report to see whether there are any obvious broken links or erroneous references cataloged in a search engine somewhere.
Copyright 1997 - 2010 :: All Rights ReservedWEBVALENCE is a registered trademark of WebValence Internet Partners