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:
| Unique Visitors | 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. |
| Number of Visits | 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. |
| Pages | 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. |
| Hits | 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). |
| Bandwidth | 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. |
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.
| Visitors Domains/Countries (Top 25) | 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. |
| Hosts Top 25 | This gives you a breakdown of the top individual visitors to your site. |
| Robots/Spider Top 25 visits | 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). |
| Visits duration | 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. |
| Files/Type | lets you see what files are generating the most hits. |
| Top 25 Pages | URL gives you the most visited pages on your site. |
| Top 10 Operating Systems | shows what Operating Systems your visitors are using in order of popularity. |
| Top 10 Browsers | Like the OS category above, this shows what browsers your visitors are using in order of popularity. |
| Connect to Site From | 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. |
| Links from a newsgroup | gives us a listing of the number of visitors coming from a newsgroup. |
| Links from an Internet Search Engine | gives us a listing of the number of visitors coming from a search engine. |
| Links from Other Web Pages | 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. |
| Links from an Internal Page | is self explanatory and Unknown is just that, not known. |
| Miscellaneous and HTTP Error codes. | These give miscellaneous information and what HTTP codes are given to your visitors. |