You may access your Web site and FTP Statistics from your control panel. http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel. Then click on the Web/FTP Stats icon.

From the Web / FTP Statistics screen you may choose from several presentations of your site's statistics:

Analog

Analog produces a simple summary of all the people who have visited your site. It is fast and provides great lightweight statistics.

Awstats

Awstats produces very pretty stats and is discussed below in detail.

Webalizer & Webalizer FTP

Webalizer is a more complex stats program that produces a nice variety of charts and graphs about who has visited your site. This is probably the most popular stats engine available today.

Subdomain Stats

This will show statistics for the subdomains on your account.

Latest Visitors

This will show you the last 300 visitors who came to your site and some interesting information about them. This is also live fee.

Bandwidth

This will show how many bytes your account has transferred.

Error Logs

This will show errors in your site — images not loading, missing files, etc. This is very useful for debugging CGI scripts. Folks like Merlyn® just love Error Logs. They even write computer programs whose sole function it to create error logs. Really.

Site Statistics--What Does It All Mean?

Awstats offers a wealth of information which may be gleaned and put to good use. And since an understanding of Awstats gives a good basis for working with any site statistics display, we offer this discussion of the information Awstats provides.

Understanding the Layout

As in any traditional page design, the main menu is located to the left of the content. Every thing is displayed on one page which makes finding information easier and faster.

At the center top of the page is the “Reported Period” selection menu. The current month is the report displayed, so the selection menu allows us to select older statistic files. Above the "Reported Period" menu is a notation of the last date and time the log files were updated.

Summary

The first section we come to is the "Summary" section. Here we find a statistical run down for the month. Included are:

Unique Visitors

Shows the number of “unique” or different visitors to a page. Unlike "Hits," this is a true number of visitors to a site for the current month.

Number of Visits

Shows the number of users that came to the site including return visitors. Here the number of unique visitors is combined with return visits. So if a user visits a page more then once in a 12 hour period, each of those visits will be counted and displayed here.

Pages

Displays the number of pages throughout the site that have been viewed for the month.

Hits

Hits are the number of visits a site receives plus the number of connections per user. Each time a Web page is displayed in a visitor's browser, the server makes multiple connections to download images, text and any other information that may be needed. This is all logged by the server — servers LOVE to count things — anything — and is displayed as the number of total "hits" a site receives.

Bandwidth

The bandwidth displays the current bandwidth usage for the month and the average usage per user. Remember what we said about servers loving to counts things?

Monthly History

Displays past months in much the same way the Summary displays the current month. This gives a short run down of unique visitors, number of visits, page views, hits, and bandwidth usage for the past 12 months.

Days of Month

Displays each day of the month and the usage statistics for that day. This includes information on number of visits, pages, hits, and bandwidth usage. The bottom of this section gives an average and a total. The average is calculated for number of visits, pages, hits and bandwidth usage each day. The total is for the month. This is the information displayed in the Summary section.

Days of Week

Displays average stats for each day of the week which clearly illustrates which days out perform others. This is helpful to those whose Web sites release information on a weekly basis.

Hours

Displays the totals for each hour of each day of each month. This gives useful information regarding the time of day in which users most frequently login.

Hosts

Displays the top 25 hosts that have visited the site. These are normally users, but in some cases can be search engines and other spidering programs. This section also shows the last time a user visited the site and gives the host IP address.

Authenticated Users

Authenticated users are those who have access to password protected sections of a site. Any section using an .htaccess file to password protect it will be displayed in this section. This lets a Webmaster know if someone has access to the site who shouldn't’t. There is also a “Last Visit” section here which displays the last time each authenticated user accessed the site.

Robots/Spiders Visitors

Robots or Spiders are used by search engines to index a site and the pages within it. This section will display a list of robots/spiders that have hit a site along with the hits and bandwidth for each. It also lists the last time the robot/spider hit the site. This information is very useful for search engine optimization.

Visits Duration

Displays the average amount of time users stay on the site. Here is where we discover if users are actually using the information provided or just scanning the home page and then leaving. This section will display the number of visits for each interval of time, along with the percentage of traffic it makes up. Visit durations are measured in minutes; there is also an hour+ interval.

Files Types

This section shows the types of files accessed on the server, the number of times each file was accessed and each file's percentage of the traffic. Also shown is the amount of bandwidth each file consumes and the percentage it uses of the total bandwidth.

Page-URL

Each time a user visits a page within a site, the system logs where they have went. "Viewed" is the total number of times users have accessed each file. Dynamically created pages will not be displayed here, only the handler file.

"Entry" shows how many users enter the site on that given page compared to the total “Viewed” number. and "Exit" shows how many visitors exited the site from a given page.

Operating Systems

Displays visitors' operating systems and the number of hits and percentage of traffic that each operating system comprises. The browser for each operating system will display the site differently. So if the site was optimized for Internet Explorer (Windows) then someone using Konqueror (Linux) will view it differently.

Browsers

Displays the browsers visitors use and the percentage of traffic each browser type represents.

Grabber

The grabber refers to a browser or program used for copying, or grabbing, the files for later use. The grabber results are a simple "yes" or "no". The most common grabber displayed here is WebCopier, an offline browser that downloads an entire site for offline viewing.

Connect to Site From

Direct Address/Bookmark

Displays the number of users that have visited a site from their own bookmarks or have typed the address in directly through their browsers. These folks are your return visitors and form the majority of the traffic to any Web site.

Links from News Group

Displays the number of links from any news groups directly to the site or its sub pages.

Links from Internet Search Engine

Displays the search engines linking to the Web site and the percentage of traffic generated from each search engine. A link to a full list is available if all are not listed.

Links from an External Page

List links from other sites instead of search engines i.e. affiliates, other Web sites and anything other then search engines.

Search Key phrases and Keywords

Displays key phrases and keywords that visitors have used to access the site. Also displayed are the number of searches in which each key word or phrase was used along with the percentage of traffic it accounts for.

Miscellaneous

Some Web masters use the number of times a visitor added the site to his bookmarks as a kind of popularity ranker.

HTTP Error Codes

Displays errors that have occurred including the number of hits each error received along with it’s percentage of traffic it accounts for. Also shown here is the amount of bandwidth each error accounted for.

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