Understanding AWStats Website Statistics

If you find that the statistics in AWStats are a little confusing, this information should help you to get a better understanding...

A brief explanation of what each of these mean is provided below:

Unique Visitors

These are the total number of visits by a unique IP address. This can be a bit misleading because dial-up visitors get a new IP Address each time they log on, so you can have the same person visit different times and still be recorded as a unique hit.

Number of Visits

The number of visits are the total number of visits by all visitors over the specified period of time. If somebody visits your site, and then comes back 4 more times during that month, you should see this as one Unique visit and 5 visits in total for that month.

Pages

This is the total number of pages viewed by visitors. This does not include images, java script or CSS, just HTML and CGI type files.

Hits

This is every file requested by the visitors to your site. It includes pages and images together. If you have a page with 2 images calling a java script file, this page would generate a total of 4 hits. This is the most commonly referenced stat, but one that is virtually meaningless. The more appropriate numbers to consider are both 'number of visits' and 'unique visitors' (see above).

Bandwidth

The total number of bytes downloaded by visitors to your site. If you have a page that has 50Kb of text, and 2 images at 24Kb and 32Kb, then each visitor to that page will use a total of 106Kb of your bandwidth.

When:

AWStats provides the above information for the year so far, and also from a monthly, daily and hourly perspective.

Who:

Domains/Countries

This shows you what countries your visitors are coming from, starting with the most common country and working its way down.

Hosts

This gives you a breakdown of the top individual visitors to your site.

Authenticated users

This will list logins

Robots/Spiders Visitors

This is a great way to see when the search engines you have submitted your site to have last visited, as well as how many hits they made (again, 'hit' can be misleading here).

Navigation:

Visits Duration

This is an important statistic, where you can tell how long visitors are staying on your site. Are a vast majority leaving in the first 30 seconds? Maybe it's time to rethink your site's design or content.

Files Type

Lets you see which files are generating the most hits.

Pages-URL

lists the most visited pages on your site.

Operating Systems

shows what Operating Systems your visitors are using in order of their popularity.

Browsers

Like the OS category above, this shows what browsers your visitors are using in order of popularity.

Screen Sizes

Shows the screen sizes of the visitors to your site

Referers:

Connect to Site From is a multi-part category.
Direct Address/Bookmarks - This is the number of visitors that either know the name of your site or have it bookmarked.
Links from a NewsGroup is self explanatory.
Links from an Internet Search Engine gives a listing of the number of visitors coming from each Search Engine your site is listed with.
Links from an external page (other websites except search engines) shows what pages your visitors are coming from. This does not mean there is a link to your website on the listed page; it just registers where the visitor was before coming to your site.
Links from an internal page (other page on same site) is self explanatory, and 'Unknown Origin' is just that, not known.

Search Keyphrases and Search Keywords

show which words and phrases were used to find our website.

Others:

Miscellaneous

This is a collection of other miscellaneous data which has been collected from visitors to your site.

HTTP Error Codes

These provide information on what HTTP Error codes have been given to your visitors. For example, if a visitor went directly to a page link and that page was no longer there, they would receive a 404 'Document Not Found' error, and it would be recorded under this section.