AW Stats- WHAT THE HAY?

Bizarre Numbers - Why?

[Sally Stitts]

Can anyone please tell me just what is going on with my AW Stats in April?
Beginning numbers vs. current numbers, by day - (The huge leap occurred on April 18.)

# of Visits - Was 3k ----- Is now 3K (no change)
Pages ------ Was 5K ----- Is now 25K (QUINTUPLED, beginning April 18)
Hits --------- Was 15K --- Is now 35K (doubled)
Bandwidth - Was 350M - Is now 700M (doubled)

How can the number of pages visited go up 5 times, while the visitors dropped slightly?

"Hits" and "bandwidth" have both doubled.

I'm perplexed. How can this be? In 15 years, I have never seen anything like this.

Thank you for any hints that you can give me.

[lucy24]

How can the number of pages visited go up 5 times, while the visitors dropped slightly?

Er... because you had fewer individual human visitors, but they each stuck around longer? On most sites that would be considered a good thing.

If your page count quintupled while the bandwidth only doubled, it sounds as if parts of the site have way too much overhead. The difference shouldn't be that great.

What’s the difference between “hits” and “pages”? If it means total number of requests vs. number of page requests only, the change ought to be proportional--especially in view of the relatively small “bandwidth” change.

For reliable information, consult your server access logs. Everything else is only an approximation.

[RhinoFish]

What is AW?

Did your bounce rate drop a ton? Smells like a redirect might be turning the landing page into two pages, like a 1-2 punch, boom.

[lucy24]

What is AW?

I was going to say: Oh, come on, you know awstats, they’re all over the place, and then I was going to fetch up the IP and UA. In so doing, I discovered that, (a) it isn’t a robot after all (I would have been prepared to bet money that there is a ubiquitous awstatsbot), and (b) the last request for /awstats/ on any of my sites was way back in 2013, and the overwhelming majority in 2011.

If you search the present site for “awstats” you’ll find very few posts later than 2009.

Huh. What did happen to awstats? Is it something hosts formerly used and now they use something else? Perhaps the better answer to OP's question is to start using a different stats package.

[not2easy]

AWStats is commonly installed as part of ControlPanel on many hosts. It offers a very simplified way for people to "analyze" their raw access logs. Nowhere near the detail of a manual inspection but better than not even looking.

[lucy24]

AWStats is commonly installed as part of ControlPanel on many hosts.

Ah, that explains it. My host rolls their own control panel so presumably they've also coded their own stats. In fact, before posting above, I opened one site's stats--which I never, ever do, and had to hunt down my username and password!--just to verify that logs would not show /awstats/.*


* This also enabled me to see that it's the second of the two - - in Apache logs that represents your login. If I ever knew, I have long since forgotten what the first - is for. In any case it was educational.

[mack]

The biggest issue I encountered with AWstats with determining what traffic was human and what was bots. This is one area where Google Analytics stands in a class of its own.

Mack.

[TorontoBoy]

Bot traffic screws up Awstats. There is no differentiation. You may have less visitors, but if one visitor is a bot and scrapes all your content, 100s of pages in one feasting session, then you will have fewer visitors but more page views. If you care about human traffic you should not use AWstat as it is not an accurate view of human traffic. It is good for server load numbers.

When you start killing bots, AWstat numbers will markedly change.

[RhinoFish]

You said AW Stats, not AWStats...
Plus the way you phrased it...
Can anyone please tell me just what is going on with my AW Stats in April?

Many people I know, use "AW" as short for AdWords (yes, it's now called Google Ads).
So I honestly was not sure what you meant.
And yes, I've heard of AWStats, but I don't know anyone who uses it. :-)

Have fun!

[Sally Stitts]

Sorry for the confusion. Yes, should have been AWStats.

I rediscovered Google Analytics, which I dropped in 2009 due to load time admonitions.
WOW! So cool to watch visitors on the map in REAL TIME, and which page they are visiting. GA has come a long way.
I have been staring at it for hours.
Giving the big G too much info? What the H. They know everything anyway. Too bad everything else is broken.

Makes AWStats look like child's play, especially with the missing, false and unpopulated data in my case.
.

[tangor]

AWStats, like Webalizer, are "legacy" log analyziers and have not been updated to address the current levels and kinds of traffic on the web these days. Useful for a "broad look", but lack the fine details. Wrote a number of scripts to mine the raw logs for that reason. GA is very useful for most ... but I like applying my own filters since I have no idea what filters g is using. Different strokes for different folks.

[lucy24]

Reminder: There exist analytics programs that do not require you to involve a third party. That way everything remains subject to your own access controls, and there is no call to a separate server. Why, this very site uses one such program.

[mack]

Lucy24 I used to always use a stats package on my own server but in recent times it's become a full-on headache trying to find the usable data within the raw data. A lot of people will have mileage that varies.

Mack.