Understanding and Using AWStats

What is AWStats?

AWStats is an open source web analytics tool which every one of our CMS built websites has access to. Located on our servers, it records details about your website traffic, including:
  • Unique Visitors - How many unique people visited your website in the last month

  • Unique Visits - How many times did they collectively visit? eg perhaps some people visit more than once per month.

  • Pages - How many pages did everyone collectively look at?

  • Countries - Where are your visitors coming from?

  • Incoming Links - Which websites are linking to you? Search Engines - Which search engines are giving you traffic?

  • Robots - How often are the search engines checking your website for new content?

  • Duration - How long are people staying on your website? This is a good indication of the quality of your home page... Aim for 60% or less leaving within 30 seconds. 40% staying longer than 30 seconds is good.

  • Keywords and Key phrases - What keywords are working for you? You might find this very interesting, and not what you expected.

The information captured by AWStats is displayed in both graph and table formats like these (all images are demo ones from AWStats official website) :

Where to Find AWStats Results in the CMS

AWStats is one of the many tools we provide users of our free website builder. You can access the data AWStats records about your website traffic by logging into the CMS and selecting the SEO button, and then the Website Statistics (AWStats) option.

Once you click upon the Website Statistics button, you have access to all of the information collected by AWStats about your website.

Understanding Your AWStats Results

Within an AWStats report, you will find different sections which focus on specific information. Here are the main sections, together with a short explanation of what you can use that specific data for:

Summary

The summary information lets you see an overview of the current report period for a specific time. This includes details about unique visitor numbers, number of visits, pages views, hits and bandwidth used.

Monthly History

Monthly history report on AWStats shows you how your traffic changes from month to month. This can be used to track seasonal variations, advertisements, social media campaigns and SEO improvements.

Days of the Month

This section shows you how many visits and pages visited during an entire month. This lets you see which days get the most traffic on your website throughout the month, which can help you plan when to publish new content or offer promotions.

Days of the Week

AWStats days of the week report shows you which days of the week receive the most traffic, which can help you decide when to publish new content or products.

Hours

The hours section of AWStats shows you how many visits your website receives during each hour. This can also be used to time promotions, products or content publishing.

Countries

This section lets you see which countries your traffic is coming from and how many pages/hits/bandwidth they visit or use. This is useful at letting you confirm that your website content or advertising is targeting the correct country.

Robots / Spiders

The robots and spiders section gives you information about how often your website is being visited and indexed by search engines and other such providers. This information is helpful at knowing how often indexing of your website occurs, particularly for the inclusion of new content within search engine files.

Visits Duration

Within the AWStats visit duration data you will learn about how long visitors stay on your website for. This is useful for identifying your bounce rate so you can work towards improving it.

File Type

The file type results show you the types of files visitors request through their use of or clicking within your website. This information can be useful at knowing which types of files to include more or less of within your website.

Downloads

The downloads area shows you data on which downloads requested by visitors to your site and how often they were downloaded (only if you have downloads uploaded to the CMS). This is useful at helping you decide which downloads to create and publish more of for your website visitors.

Operating Systems

The AWStats operating systems data shows you what operating systems people are using when they visit your website. This could help if you are targeting specific users of these systems.

Browsers

Details of which browsers visitors use and how often they are used are displayed within this section. This is useful if you want to target specific browser users.

Connect to Site From

This handy bit of information lets you know which websites your traffic is coming from, including from search engines. This can help you see if your guest posts or advertising are working.

Search Keyphrases & Keywords

Discover what search terms visitors are using within search engines to find your website. This helps you with targeting your written content.
Users may have noticed that sometimes stats from AWStats are missing or incomplete, such as in January 2020. This doesn't mean that your website did not get any traffic, just that AWStats did not record it.
Adding the Google Analytics code to your website will enable more detailed web statistics to be captured and use. To do this, you will need a Google Analytics account and then enter your tracking code under SEO - Tracking.

Tags: seo  

Posted: Wednesday 15 January 2020


 


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