Understanding AWStats Print

This article will introduce and clarify some of the terms and phrases used by AWStats and by website statistics tools in general. For additional reading we recommend the AWStats Documentation.

Unique Visitors

A unique visitor is a 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 host make several visits during this period, it is counted only once.

The period shown by AWStats reports is by default the current month.

Visits

Number of Visits made by all Unique Visitors.

A Visit refers to each time a visitor accesses the website. During that one visit, or session, they may look at a number of Pages in the site. This counts as a single visit.

AWStats will count page views as part of the same visit if there is no more than 60 minutes between each page view. So if a visitor comes back 2 hours later to the website, this is counted as a new Visit. But if they came back 20 minutes later it is counted as part of the same visit.

Page Views

The number of individual "pages" viewed.

By default all files and folders on a website are counted as a "Page" unless the files have one of the following extensions:

• css
• js
• class
• gif
• jpg
• jpeg
• png
• bmp
• rss
• xml
• swf

Hits

All files requested from the server. This includes Pages, Images, CSS, JavaScript and other files.

Bandwidth

Total number of bytes downloaded.

Entry Page

The first page viewed by a visitor during their visit.

Note: When a visit spans the end of one month and the start of the next, you might have an Entry page for that month report but no corresponding Exit page for that visit. This explains why the number of Entry pages can be different to the number of Exit pages.

Exit Page

Last page viewed by a visitor during its visit.

Note: When a visit spans the end of one month and the start of the next, you might have an Entry page for that month report but no corresponding Exit page for that visit. This explains why the number of Entry pages can be different to the number of Exit pages.

Session Duration

The time a visitor spent on your site for each visit.

Some Visits Durations are 'unknown' because they can't always be calculated.

Grabber

A browser that is used primarily for copying locally an entire site. These include for example "teleport", "webcapture", "webcopier"...

Add To Favourites

This value, available in the "miscellanous chart", reports an estimated value of the number of times a visitor has added your web site into its favourite bookmarks.

The technical rules for that is the following formula:

Number of Add to Favourites = round((x y) / r) where x = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/anydir/favicon.ico", with a referer field not defined, and with no 404 error code y = Number of hits made by IE browsers for "/favicon.ico", with a referer field not defined, with or without 404 error code r = Ratio of hits made by IE browsers compared to hits made by all browsers (r <= 1)

As you can see in formula, only IE is used to count reliable "add", the "Add to favourites" for other browsers are estimated using ratio of other browsers usage compared to ratio of IE usage. The reason is that only IE do a hit on favicon.ico ONLY when a user add the page to its favourites. The other browsers make hits on this file also for other reasons so we can't count one "hit" as one "add" since it might be a hit for another reason. AWStats differentiate also hits with error and not to avoid counting multiple hits made recursively in upper path when favicon.ico file is not found in deeper directory of path.

HTTP Status Codes

HTTP status codes are returned by web servers to indicate the status of a request. Codes 200 and 304 are used to tell the browser the page can be viewed. All other codes generates hits and traffic 'not seen' by the visitor. For example a return code 301 or 302 will tell the browser to ask another page. The browser will do another hit and should finaly receive the page with a return code 200 and 304. All codes that are 'unseen' traffic are isolated by AWStats in the HTTP Status report chart, enabled by the directives ShowHTTPErrorsStats. in config file. You can also change value for 'not error' hits (set by default to 200 and 304 with the ValidHTTPcodes directive. The following table outlines all status codes defined for the HTTP/1.1 draft specification outlined in IETF rfc 2068.

They are 3-digit codes where the first digit of this code identifies the class of the status code and the remaining 2 digits correspond to the specific condition within the response class. They are classified in 5 categories:

• 1xx - Informational
• 2xx - Successful
• 3xx - Redirection
• 4xx - Client Error
• 5xx - Server Error

1xx Class - Informational

Informational status codes are provisional responses from the web server... they give the client a heads-up on what the server is doing. Informational codes do not indicate an error condition.

2xx Class - Successful

This class of status code indicates that the client's request was received, understood, and successful.

3xx Class - Redirection

This code tells the client that the browser should be redirected to another URL in order to complete the request. This is not an error condition.

4xx Class - Client Error

This status code indicates that the client has sent bad data or a malformed request to the server. Client errors are generally issued by the webserver when a client tries to gain access to a protected area using a bad username and password.

5xx Class - Server Error

This status code indicates that the client's request couldn't be succesfully processed due to some internal error in the web server. These error codes may indicate something is seriously wrong with the web server.