How To Understand AWStats Web Host Traffic Stats?

[HomerJ]

Noob question coming atcha. ... I've tried to look this info up before and always find it horribly deficient in terms of anything definitive on how to really read these reports.

Mainly I want to know how it compares to a Google Analytics report. Essentially, with the two, you will be given

GA:
Visitors
Visits
Pageviews

AWStats:
Uniques
Visits
Pages

But its pretty apparent by the numbers these two sets cannot be perfectly analogous. i.e. - I think that GA 'Visitors' and AWS 'Uniques' mean the same, but GA 'Pageviews' and AWS 'Pages' definitely do NOT mean the same.

if they did, a site I am looking at in AWS would have about 8+ pages/unique. Very unlikely!

I thought I had read before that AWS 'pages' meant the number of pages being called by the server, so that would include for example, CSS Stylesheets. Is this the case?

If so, does that mean AWS does not count pageviews at all? or does it mean that 'Visits' is analogous to pageviews? If so, then they don't calculate actual visits/visitor??

don't know why, i've always been a bit confused by hosting stats.

 

[Johnn]

AWStats

• Unique Visitors – A unique visitor is a person or computer (host) that has made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your web site during the current period shown by the report. If this user makes several visits during this period, it is counted only once. Visitors are tracked by IP address, so if multiple users are accessing your site from the same IP (such as a home or office network), they will be counted as a single unique visitor.
• Number of Visits – The number of visits are the total number of visits by all visitors over a given period of time. If a user visits your site and then comes back 6 more time you should see a unique visit total as 1 and 7 total visits.
• Pages - This is the total number of pages viewed by visitors. Pages are usually HTML, PHP or ASP files, not images or other files requested as a result of loading a “Page” such as javascript or css files.

GA

• Visits: The number of visits to your site during a given time period -- Default time period is 30 days (I will tell you how to change this date range further down in this article).
• Pageviews: The number of pages the total number of visitors viewed.
• Pages/Visit: The average visit in terms of page views. Meaning that it is the average number of pages a visitor viewed before leaving your website.

 

[HomerJ]

Thanks Johnn!!!

so with their definition of Unique Visitors as 'person or computer (host)' that would seem to include bots, and therefore make the stats essentially worthless, no?

 

[Johnn]

Thanks Johnn!!!

so with their definition of Unique Visitors as 'person or computer (host)' that would seem to include bots, and therefore make the stats essentially worthless, no?

Yes

Beside GA uses different algorithm (based on average) vs real time from AWstats.