Knowledgebase: Site Functions
Statistics for Your Site
Posted by on 30 May 2012 01:15 PM

Stat programs generally analyze a server's log file, which stores information on every single visitor, to gather information such as unique views, hits from search engines, total bandwidth used when, and more useful information. In cPanel, there's AWStats but another extremely popular option for anyone interested in learning more about their sites performance and traffic, on a cPanel-based website or otherwise, is Google Analytics. 

Google Analytics vs AWStats

The stats program AWStats is a very common one and offered through most hosting providers via cPanel. When in cPanel, click the magnifying glass adjacent to the domain in question from the AWStats screen to see all the nitty-gritty and data about your site. 

Tracking the traffic that a website generates can help a site owner decide how successful their marketing efforts are. Big content websites often hire third-party companies to track their website traffic, whereas smaller websites can use standard web tools such as Google Analytics or AWStats to get their desired results.

How AwStats and Google Analytics Operate

Though both programs display website statistics, the overall operations of each are different in the terms of the way they work.

AWStats is a program that is hosted on your server and would require the user to access the server's web-based control panel (in our case cPanel) to access the desired data. The web server would generate and store a log for every visit to each site hosted on the server. AWStats would process the log files to create its reports, which is why AWStats is often referred to as a log file analyzer.

Google Analytics differs, as it requires specific code, that uses a combination of Javascript and Cookies to be loaded onto each page of a site, to notify Google each time that one of the site pages has been visited. Since it's possible for an Internet user to disable cookies and/or Javascript in their browsers the code that Google Analytics uses sometimes does not get run, and therefore those visits are not counted. Luckily, very few users browse with cookies and Javascript disabled.

Why Do the Results Differ?

When comparing the figures of AWstats and Google Analytics to one another, you notice right away that the figures for AWStats are usually much larger. The reason for the higher numbers is that AWStats detects search engine bots that access or crawl websites to learn more about content, link structure and more, whereas Google Analytics cannot detect this type of traffic.

These days crawl stats are far less important, and information on how search engine bots see your website is readily available from major search engines if you sign up for a service like Google's Webmaster tools or Yahoo!'s Site Explorer.

 

See also Change AWStats Config File, Enable AWStats Updating



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