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What are Web Stats (AWStats)

AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers.

Features for Web Stats (AWStats)

A full log analysis enables AWStats to show you the following information:
* Number of visits, and number of unique visitors,
* Visits duration and last visits,
* Authenticated users, and last authenticated visits,
* Days of week and rush hours (pages, hits, KB for each hour and day of week),
* Domains/countries of hosts visitors (pages, hits, KB, 269 domains/countries detected, GeoIp detection),
* Hosts list, last visits and unresolved IP addresses list,
* Most viewed, entry and exit pages,
* Files type,
* Web compression statistics (for mod_gzip or mod_deflate),
* OS used (pages, hits, KB for each OS, 35 OS detected),
* Browsers used (pages, hits, KB for each browser, each version (Web, Wap, Media browsers: 97 browsers, more than 450 if using browsers_phone.pm library file),
* Visits of robots (319 robots detected),
* Worms attacks (5 worm’s families),
* Search engines, keyphrases and keywords used to find your site (The 115 most famous search engines are detected like yahoo, google, altavista, etc…),
* HTTP errors (Page Not Found with last referrer, …),
* Other personalized reports based on url, url parameters, referrer field for miscellaneous/marketing purpose,
* Number of times your site is “added to favourites bookmarks”.
* Screen size (need to add some HTML tags in index page).
* Ratio of Browsers with support of: Java, Flash, RealG2 reader, Quick time reader, WMA reader, PDF reader (need to add some HTML tags in index page).
* Cluster report for load balanced servers ratio.

How do you get Web Stats (AWStats)?

You already have it! It comes free with your Effect-Web-Media account!

How do you use Web Stats (AWStats)?

1. Log into cPanel - AWStats is located in your Web Hosting Account Control Panel (cPanel). To access your cPanel, follow the directions in Accessing Your Web Hosting Account Control Panel (cPanel)
   


2. Once in cPanel, you will see several icons. Find the one that looks like and is labeled Web/FTP Stats. Click it to open the stats page.
   


3. You will see a page that will have several statistical scripts available to you. Find the AWStats link and click it.
   


4. You will now see a statistical page for your domain. It will look something like the following:

Understanding the results in Web Stats (AWStats)

AWStats is broken into 5 main categories, When, Who, Navigation, Referrers, and Others. When tells you when the domain has seen traffic and how much traffic it has seen. Who tells you who is generating that traffic and where they are from. Navigation helps you understand what users are viewing on the site, how long they are visiting, what operating system they use and what browser they use. Referrers help you determine how the user found the site. It also helps you know what keywords or keyphrases were used in search engines to find the site. Others gives you information not covered in the previous four categories.

At the top of the page you can select a date for which the reports are generated. The default date is the current month and year but you can change it to previous months to view data from the past. In the details below, selected month and year will refer to this date.

I will now break down each category by the items listed in the category to further describe it’s function.

When

• Monthly History gives you a quick look at the unique visitors, number of visits, pages, hits, and bandwidth used for each month of the selected year. This can help you manage your bandwidth usage or see where your site may have spiked or dropped based on a change made to the site. Although not very specific, monthly history can give you a real quick look at what your site is doing.


• Days of Month gives you the daily breakdown of number of visits, pages, hits, and bandwidth usage for the selected month and year. This is helpful if you see a spike or drop in usage for a specific month to determine what caused the change in traffic. Maybe you will find that you had a spike on a weekend where you were running a special on your site. Knowing this information can help you determine what changes on your site is bringing users to you and what changes may be keeping them away.


• Days of Week breaks the selected month into the seven days of the week and tells you the number of pages, hits and bandwidth used for day of the week. Again this can be helpful if you know your traffic is usually on Saturday and Sunday vs the rest of the week.


• Hours gives you the hourly breakdown of number of pages, hits, and bandwidth used. By using both Days of Week and Hours data you can determine exactly when your visitors are viewing your site.

Who

• Countries lists the top 25 countries that users are from and the number of pages, hits, and bandwidth used by each country.
  
  
  
  • Full List shows you all countries if you have more than 25 countries visiting your site.


• Hosts shows the top 25 hosts that users use to visit your site. It tells you the number of pages, hits, bandwidth used and last visit time and date for each host.
  
  
  
  • Full List shows a complete list of hosts.
  
  
  • Last Visit orders the hosts by most recent visit to the oldest visit
  
  
  • Unresolved IP Address lists any ip address that accessed your site and the ip address could not resolve the host.


• Authenticated Users shows any user that attempts to access a page requiring authentication, and records whatever text is entered in the username box. This can be helpful if you have restricted pages and want to view who has gained access if someone is trying to that shouldn’t.
  
  
  
  • Full List displays the full list of users.
  
  
  • Last Visit orders the users by most recent visit to oldest visit.


• Robots/Spiders Visitors shows what robots/spiders (AKA bots) are finding your site. Bots are used by search engines to help understand what your site is about and to create an entry for your site in the search engine.
  
  
  
  • Full List shows the full list of bots.
  
  
  • Last Visit shows the bots from most recent visit to oldest visit.

Navigation

• Visit Duration tells you how long visits have lasted. The duration of a visit can only be computed when a visitor reads two or more pages within a certain period of time. A reader could look at one single page on your site for 6 hours (for example), but if there is not a second page visit to compute the duration of the visit, that particular visit is measured as 0 in the stats. The 0s-30s visitors are for the most part reading a single page on your site. How long they’re reading that page, the stats cannot accurately reflect.


• File Type tells you what file types are being accessed, number of hits, percent of total hits, bandwidth, and percent of bandwidth. Common file types are image files like .gif or .jpg. Also the pages themselves like .htm, .html, .php will also appear in this section. Knowing what file types are taking up your bandwidth can help you find where cuts can be made if your bandwidth usage gets too high. Say that you had a video file type that used 95% of your bandwidth, with this tool you can see that and make changes to help free up some of that bandwidth.


• Viewed shows the top 25 pages viewed. It tells you the number of times viewed, average size, entry and exit stats.
  
  
  
  • Full List is the full list of viewed pages.
  
  
  • Entry is the first page viewed by a visitor during their visit. This page will sort pages by most entry count to least entry count.
  
  
  • Exit is the last page viewed by a visitor during their visit. This page will sort pages by most exit count to least exit count.


• Operating Systems breaks down the basic operating system used by the visitor. It displays the type of OS, number of hits and percentage of all hits.
  
  
  
  • Versions is a more detailed version of operating systems. Instead of just showing Windows it displays Windows XP, Windows 2000 and so on.
  
  
  • Unknown lists stats for the operating systems that could not be determined. 


• Browsers breaks down the basic browsers used by visitors.  It will help you determine how you design your page based on browsers used.  Many features used can only be seen by certain browsers.  IE and FireFox are currently the most popular browsers used and both will display most features used by webmasters.
  
  
  
  • Versions breaks down each browser type by version.  This can be extremely helpful during the design process.  If your users are still using IE 3 or IE 4, many of today’s features will not be visible to them.
  
  
  • Unknown lists the stats for unknown browsers.

Referrers

• Origin will help you determine how your users are getting to your site.  There are direct links that are either typed into the address bar or a bookmark, search engines and referring sites.




• Referring Search Engines lists the search engines that refer users to your site.


• Referring Sites lists websites that link to your site.


• Search show what phrases or words are being used in search engines to find your site.




• Search Keyphrases displays the top 10 phrases used and how many times it was used.


• Search Keywords displays the top 25 words used and how many times it was used.

Others

• Miscellaneous displays miscellaneous things like number of users who bookmarked your site, do they have java installed, can they view pdf, and so on.  Again helpful information when deciding what features to add to your site.


• HTTP Error Codes displays the errors that users have encountered on your site, what the error was, and how many times the error has been hit.




• Pages Not Found displays a list of pages that users have attempted to access but were not found.  This can be helpful in finding a dead link  on your site.

Click here for a Glossary of terms and HTTP Error Definitions

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 3rd, 2005 at 2:11 pm and is filed under How-To's and Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.