AWStats Site Statistics Explanation
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When reading your web statistics in AWStats you may see a few unfamiliar words and terms. This guide will explain what they
mean.
The first things you will see are;
Unique Visitors
Number of Visits
Pages
Hits
Bandwidth
These can be a bit confusing so here is a brief explanation:
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Unique Visitors
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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 each time they log on so you can have the same person visit
different times and give a unique hit.
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Number of Visits
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The number of visits are the total number of visits
by all visitors over a given period of time. If I visit your site
and then come back 4 more time you should see one Unique visit and 5
visits from me.
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Pages
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This is the total number of pages viewed by
visitors. This does not include images, java script or CSS and the
like. Just HTML and CGI type files.
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Hits
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This is every file requested by the visitor. This
includes pages and images together. If you have a page with 2 images
calling a java script file the page will generate a total of 4 hits.
The most common referenced stat used and one that is virtually
meaningless (and useless). The more appropriate numbers to consider
are both 'number of visitors' and 'unique visitors' (see above).
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Bandwidth
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The total number of bytes downloaded. If you have a
page that has 50 KB of text, 2 images at 24 and 32 KB then each
visitor to that page will take 106 KB of your bandwidth.
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AWStats then gives you this information for the year so far as well as a 30 and 7 day perspective. Finally it gives it to you by the hour.
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Visitors Domains/Countries (Top 25)
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This shows
you what countries your visitors are coming from, starting with the
most and working its way down.
NOTES: All categories with a Top 10 or 25 have a link to the right
of the category that can give you an entire list if there are more
than 10 or 25.
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Hosts Top 25
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This gives
you a breakdown of the top individual visitors to your site.
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Robots/Spider Top 25 visits
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Here is a
great way to see when your favorite search engine has last visited
your site as well as how many hits it has made (again, 'hit' can be
misleading here).
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Visits duration
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Visits
Duration is an important one. Here 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 sites design or content.
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Files/Type
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lets you
see what files are generating the most hits.
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Top 25 Pages
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URL gives
you the most visited pages on your site.
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Top 10 Operating Systems
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shows what
Operating Systems your visitors are using in order of popularity.
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Top 10 Browsers
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Like the OS
category above, this shows what browsers your visitors are using in
order of popularity.
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Connect to Site From
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This is a
multi-part category. It starts with Direct Address/Bookmark. This is
the number of visitors that either know the name of your site or
have it bookmarked.
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Links from a newsgroup
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gives us a listing of the number of visitors coming
from a newsgroup.
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Links from an Internet Search Engine
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gives us a listing of the number of visitors coming
from a search engine.
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Links from Other Web Pages
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shows what pages your visitors are coming from.
This does not mean there is a link to your site on the listed page; it just
registers where the visitor was coming from.
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Links from an Internal Page
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is self explanatory and Unknown is just that,
not known.
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Miscellaneous and HTTP Error codes.
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These give
miscellaneous information and what HTTP codes are given to your visitors.
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