Awstats is far from intuitive

Torrential Web Dev

Friday, November 10. 2006

Posted by Jonathan Street in Website Management, Misc at 22:16

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Awstats is far from intuitive

A few days ago I was going through the site statistics in Awstats and noticed that 72% of my visitors were coming from bookmarks and direct links. This didn't seem right so I posted a thread in the traffic analysis forum on digitalpoint asking if anyone knew why this value might be so high. Luckily I very quickly got a great reply back from Jean-Luc.
I don't normally like quoting verbatim but I think in this case it is justified,

The confusion comes from the way AWStats counts the referrers. There are three things to know:
  • AWStats counts a referrer for each page that is viewed and for each hit, while you probably expect to only count a referrer for each visit.

  • AWStats disregards internal referrers (when going from page A of your site to page B of your site).

  • every hit from a web client that hides referrers is counted as "direct address/bookmarks".


He goes on to highlight a tool he has created which attempts to correct the results from awstats and return something more intuitive - Awstats referrers - visits.

I'm not sure how much longer I'll be using Awstats, the site re-deisgn which is 'in the works' may be an ideal time to integrate an alternative. I'm not sure what that will be yet though.

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Well I never.. I get something like 80% direct address/bookmark figures in my awstats which was a big ego boost :-). I guess this brings me back down to earth. According to the site you have linked above its more like 70%.
#1 Abdussamad Abdurrazzaq (Homepage) on 2006-11-19 02:43 (Reply)
Mine says something like 90% (from direct address/bookmarks), which scares me a lot. There must be something wrong with Awstats.
#2 Kym (Homepage) on 2008-07-12 02:51 (Reply)

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