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Are you looking at your statistics in AWstats and wondering what all those numbers really mean? Hopefully this awstats tutorial will help clear things up for you.

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-day and 7-day perspective. Finally it gives it to you by the hour.

Next is Visitors Domains/Countries (Top-25)*. This shows you what countries your visitors are coming from, starting with the most and working its way down.

* 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.


Following this is the Hosts Top-25. This gives you a breakdown of the top individual visitors to your site.

Next is a popular category, 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).

Although not as popular of a category, the 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 the OS popularity.

Next is Top-10 Browsers. Like the OS category above, this shows what browsers your visitors are using in order of popularity.

Connect to Site From 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 news-group is just that.

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 website 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.

Next we have our top-10 key-phrases and top-25 keywords used to find our web-site.

The last 2 are Miscellaneous and HTTP Error codes. These give miscellaneous information and what HTTP codes are given to your visitors.

(Thanks to Critical Mass for Posting this Free AWstats Tutorial on The-Web!)