Data shown by AWStats

[paxman]

Hi.

We have an odd situation on one of our sites where awstats shows very low hits on the site the last few months.

This was partly due possibly to one of the site main url paths to pages being changed with no redirects. Not by me! Also something i can not change currently (long story).

However the traffic should have gradually built up again. It has not and i am looking for other problems that might be affecting it.

My question (s) are - having a new seo company who are doing lots of social media stuff should awstats pick up hits to the contact page on the site from the social media platforms? My experiance says yes but there are very few hits to the contact page on the site. Also hits in general are down all over the site.

There is also an adwords campaign and again I am sure the contacts page would get hits from this but they are not showing up. BTW I checked using another metrics app and similar hits are shown

Anyone have experience of such things? Have i missed something here?

Thanks

[not2easy]

Hello paxman and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Since AWStats is analyzing your server logs, it should pick up all server requests. You could look through your logs and compare what you see vs. what is being reported. If these readings do not agree, you could look into the settings for AWStats. It is an open source log analyzer and even Wikipedia can help or their sourceforge site can help with discrepancies. You won't always know where they're coming from as referers don't normally show in your logs, most shown 'referers' are bots. AdWords would likely supply more data regarding click source.

Having said that, it would seem a bad move to change URL paths without redirecting because that can increase 404s which are not helpful.

[Kendo]

I use AWstats and find no correlation to traffic that concerns me. Google Analytics is not much better.

A point to note is that AWstats has not been updated for many years.

I have been trying to access which visitors are really coming in from search results. In these days, that can mean all visitors not coming from a backlink, because today, users only type in a product name, company name or a malformed url to be presented with pages of search results.

What I have discovered is not good. On one site that AWstats reports as having 900-1400 unique visitors per day, my new logging system reports only about 100 per day, and a lot of those are suss because I am using referer as the criteria with a list of known search engine domains... a lot of links are coming in with google.com as the referer while the user's IP address is on Google servers.

[paxman]

Thanks for replies. I checked the raw logs and it tends to support the Awstats and Webaliser metrics on this occasion. Hits to the contact us page are almost non existent. In general the traffic is way down still. So although it can be wildly innaccurate for total hits the trend is unmistakeable. The social media pages of course have email links as well as contactus ones so I have to assume we get some enquiries that way. Still the website traffic in general needs to be investigated. Part of the problem other than the URL error was the designers significantly reduced the text content of the site and have gone for more images so Google is probably not very happy.