Forum Moderators: DixonJones
Questions:
1. How good is AWStats?
2. What are the top programs in the field (what _is_ the field)?
3. What do people use stats for?
4. AWStats categorizes daily activity according to Number of Visits, Pages, and Hits (for monthly stats it adds Unique Visitors). Which of these is most important to a potential advertiser?
5. If you have, say, 100 visits and 2,000 hits in a day does that mean that 100 people each clicked on 200 links? (Doesn't sound likely to me, at least based on my own Web browsing.)
Thank you.
[edited by: webdiversity at 10:19 pm (utc) on May 21, 2004]
[edit reason] No specific URL's please [/edit]
I find it great for it's search engine reporting. Better than webalizer by far in that department.
2. What are the top programs in the field (what _is_ the field)?
Webtrends is THE TOP program imho, but out of most small businesses budget. Awstats is great for small operations.
3. What do people use stats for?
For information on the demographic, traffic trends etc. They are what they are entitled. ie: statistics. It's a way for you to see at a glance how your website is performing over time.
4. AWStats categorizes daily activity according to Number of Visits, Pages, and Hits (for monthly stats it adds Unique Visitors). Which of these is most important to a potential advertiser?
Unique visitors and hits are both important. No point advertising if there are only 100 people per month seeing the ad.
5. If you have, say, 100 visits and 2,000 hits in a day does that mean that 100 people each clicked on 200 links? (Doesn't sound likely to me, at least based on my own Web browsing.)
100 visits and 2000 hits would, if i am not mistaken, indicate that each visitor has loaded 20 pages on your site. This could include loading one page 10 times and 5 others two times each, or twenty individual pages.
[edited by: webdiversity at 10:23 pm (utc) on May 21, 2004]
[edit reason] URL snipped [/edit]
Well, I guess that's the $64,000 question -- how many people are enough to warrant someone advertising?
Specifically, I have a content site that's only been around a couple of months that has about 1,500 visitors/mo and 40k hits/mo. At what point would an advertiser be interested in my site?
aw stats is good for giving a quick overview of your site. my host provides urchin too and this does have a filter so you can ignore your own ip address and get a more representative view.
i also like the country list in awstats, expecially as i got usa government in mine. nice to know they stopped by.
Yeah, the Prez and Rummy stopped by mine, too. Nice to know they take time off.
Awstats logs "unique" visitors and total visitors so if I visit your site this morning and tonight, it will increment "unique" once and total twice.
rharri
3. What do people use stats for?
This is the most important question of all. Stats are your lifeblood. They are the only real source of fine grained detailed information for your site. Without them you have no idea what's really going on (unless you're looking at the raw logs all the time).
Your stats will provide you with evidence of whether or not your site is sinking, swimming or treading water. They'll tell you which pages are doing well and which aren't. They'll tell you who is visiting your site and when. They'll tell you lots more too, if you're willing to listen closely ;)
Most people are in this to make their sites bigger/better/badder/leaner/meaner/etc... Take a look at what your stats are telling you. Are you getting lots of SE traffic? Not enough? Lots of inbound link traffic? Not enough?
You'll have to pardon the ranting and raving on my part here, but this is a topic that I feel strongly about since stats have helped me out so much. They're are important to everyone for different reasons, but in the end what matters is that they're important. Everyone who's taken the time to go through their stats carefully can come up with a number of anecdotal stories that show their worth, but when you look at the big picture, the base reason is that it's really hard to improve your site without looking at and analyzing your stats.
Stats give you leads, not answers. When you understand your site, you can follow the leads the stats are giving you and hopefully come to some good helpful conclusions. I wish you the best of luck, and hope that this helps a little :)
my host provides urchin too and this does have a filter so you can ignore your own ip address and get a more representative view.
I use awstats and also a commercial statistics package which I will omit the name of.
The difference between the packages is that the former uses server logs (and optionally minimal javascript), the latter uses javascript (and noscript images) and employs better more comprehensive tracking but does not catch everything.
I tend to use awstats more for server level and visitor overall pattern type statistics, and the commercial package to look at what individual users do, where they came from, what they click to, bounce rates by page, and other information awstats does not report. I find I better trust awstats statistics and it gives me a lot of invaluable information (such as spider visits and dates) that the commercial package cannot provide, but it also has its pitfalls - for instance time skewing (my server is set to UTC - awstats provides a time offset flag but it is very resourcce intensive) which makes for fat saturdays and lean mondays.
My sites tend to deal with products rather then advertising - and the widgets we offer are rather targeted - so the actual number of visitors is less important to us then trends in this number (is it rising, is it going more towards certain pages or areas, etc). Because of this I tend not to evaluate the accuracy of either of the solutions - I figure that if there is erranous data it will stay relatively static.
About 50% of all hits result in 304 Not Modified, or a browser cache refresh. Almost all of the 304s are on the same small set of static files (js and images). These requests could be drasticly reduced with a reasonable Expires header.
About 15% of all hits result in 302 Found, or a temporary redirect. These could be entirely eliminated with about one hour of work since requests to foo/ redirect to foo/default.asp, and all the dynamic navigation points to foo/.
About 30% of all hits result in 200 OK.
For a day's worth of traffic, the 302s and 304s use about 250M of data out of about 1G/day. Fixing the 302s and reducing the 304s can result in significant bandwidth savings and considerably less load on the server, since socket setup and teardown time is always more expensive than the data transfer.
Now if I can only get the server people to actually implement them...
I would say the most important bit of information is unique visitors.
Pab, as previously mentioned, if you're shopping for advertisers, unique IPs are what normally give the best indication of your site's reach. Advertisers want to reach as many different people as possible.
