23rdNov
Viewing Site Statistics With AWStats
AWStats presents statstics on one large page. You can navigate the statistics using the menu on the left.
There are several different ways to gauge the amount of traffic your website receives. Here is an explanation of the measurement terms used throughout these statistics:
- Unique Visitors - A unique visitor is a computer that has made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your web site during the current period shown by the report. If they make several visits during this period, it is counted only once.
- Visits - Number of visits made by all visitors - if a visitor accesses a page, and then requests three others without an hour between any of the requests, this is counted as one visit.
- Pages - The number of individual pages requested by all visitors.
- Hits - Counts all files requested by visitors (html, stylesheets, javascript files, images), several of which make up a typical page view.
- Bandwidth - Total number of bytes for pages, images and files downloaded by web browsing.
- Entry Page - First page viewed by a visitor during their visit.
- Exit Page - Last page viewed by a visitor during their visit.
- Session Duration - The time a visitor spent on your site for each visit.
Logging on to AWStats
- AWStats can be accessed by typing http://www.yoursite.co.uk:2082/frontend/x/stats/awstats.html (replace yoursite.co.uk with the domain name of your web site) into your internet browser
- When prompted, enter the username and password you have been provided with.
- There may also be a link to AWStats from your website administration area.
Who is visiting the website?
You can see how many people are visiting your website within various periods of time from the Monthly history, Days of month, Days of week and Hours sections.
The Countries section shows what country your visitors are from, and you can see what Operating Systems and Browsers they use in the corresponding sections.
How is the website being found?
The Connecting to site from section shows how people arrive at the website:
- Direct address / Bookmarks represents the people who have typed the website URL directly into the browser, or who have bookmarked it in the past and clicked on their bookmark.
- Links from an Internet Search Engine shows people who made a search and came from each search engine's website. The Search keyphrases and Search keywords sections below show what people typed into these search engines that lead them to the website.
- Links from an external page lists the links on other websites that are used to get to your website.
Click the Full List link next to any of these to view a complete rundown.
How is the website being used?
The Pages-URL section lists the pages visitors are viewing in order of popularity. Click the Entry and Exit links for a ranking of the pages that visitors view first and last during a visit.
The homepage of your site is represented by a lone forward slash (/). The number of times this is an Exit page, for example, represents how many people have only viewed the home page before ending their visit.
You can see how long people spend on the website from the Visits duration section.
Changing timeframe of statistics displayed
All statistics displayed fall within the timescale selected at the top of the page. This will be the current month by default, but you can change this by selecting the month and year from the Reported period option at the top of the page, and clicking OK.
Further Information
More information on AWStats (some of it quite technical) can be found on wikipedia.