How to analyse, understand and make use of the vital information held in your website statistics report…

Awstats is an online web statistics reporting tool. It provides a comprehensive web site statistical analysis on the log files stored for the website. This provides monthly history of number of visitors, host list of visitors, robot visits, visit duration, operating systems used, browsers used, referring search engines, referring external sites, search keyphrases and keywords, error codes.

Awstats provides a full log analysis and shows you the following information:

• Number of visits, and number of unique visitors,
• Visits duration and last visits,
• Authenticated users, and last authenticated visits,
• Days of week and rush hours (pages, hits, KB for each hour and day of week),
• Domains/countries of hosts visitors (pages, hits, KB, 269 domains/countries detected, GeoIp detection),
• Hosts list, last visits and unresolved IP addresses list,
• Most viewed, entry and exit pages,
• Files type,
• Web compression statistics (for mod_gzip or mod_deflate),
• OS used (pages, hits, KB for each OS, 35 OS detected),
• Browsers used (pages, hits, KB for each browser, each version (Web, Wap, Media browsers: 97 browsers, more than 450 if using browsers_phone.pm library file),
• Visits of robots (319 robots detected),
• Worms attacks (5 worm's families),
• Search engines, keyphrases and keywords used to find your site (The 115 most famous search engines are detected like yahoo, google, altavista, etc...),
• HTTP errors (Page Not Found with last referrer, ...),
• Other personalized reports based on url, url parameters, referer field for miscellanous/marketing purpose,
• Number of times your site is "added to favourites bookmarks"
• Screen size (need to add some HTML tags in index page)
• Ratio of Browsers with support of: Java, Flash, RealG2 reader, Quicktime reader, WMA reader, PDF reader (need to add some HTML tags in index page)
• Cluster report for load balanced servers ratio

You can access your log analyser reports by adding /webstats on the end of your website URL.

The report is updated every night meaning that the information should never be more than 24 hours old.

How to Get the most out of your website...

What is the purpose of your website?

Marketing:

To measure the success of any offers or campaigns you have running, you can setup special landing pages and see the number of visits to that page on the ‘Pages-URL’ section of the AWstats report.

Popularity:

Your monthly history will tell you the number of monthly unique visitors and total number of visits. From these two numbers you can deduce the number of repeat visits. Having a repeat visit of over 10% reflects that you have a popular website as your customers and prospects come back to your website.

The number of pages represents the total monthly number of pages viewed. If you divide this by the number of visits, you can get a good idea of how many pages the average visitor views.

Visibility:

To determine you visibility, you can see which directories and external sites are referring you on the ‘Referrers’ section of the AWstats report.

This tells you which search engine is providing you the most visitors and which external links are bringing in traffic to your site.

You can also look at the ‘Search keyphrases’ section of the AWstats report to tell you the most popular search terms that find your website. You can use this information to help you decide on how to improve your search engine optimization strategies.

Branding:

To determine the success of your branding, you can perform this with a combination of landing pages for tracking interest in your branding, and monitoring which brand name search keyphrases are being used to find your website.

Education:

If you have great products and services, but your sales through your website are not as good as you think they should, then you can investigate how well you are educating your customers.

You can determine how well your navigation is by tracking how long your visitors stay on your website. You can see this in the ‘Visits duration’ section of the AWstats report.

You can also setup special landing pages to check if your visitors are reading a certain page you want them to. You can do this by adding landing pages to your ‘call to action’ section on your website.

Summary

In a nutshell, to make your website work, you need to start measuring all your key performance indicators. You can do this by setting up landing pages for the areas of interest and use AWstats to track the visits.

Further Info

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