cPanel reseller tutorials – the AwStats tool
After several weeks of writing about MySQL, it’s time for a change of subject. And since we’ve already covered both the Mail and the FTP sections of the cPanel Control Panel, we can finally turn our eyes to the Awstats section.
Website statistics are vital for every website owner since they provide valuable information – when is his website visited, which are the most popular web pages, what browsers are used, and what are the keywords people use to get to his site. This is vital for creating your marketing strategy and advertising campaigns. And all this information is simply waiting for you in your cPanel control panel.
Today, I will explain what exactly all the graphs and columns in the Awstats menu represent.
The Awstats area of the web hosting control panel is divided in two sections. The first one contains links to the other subsections. This is the partition on the left side of the screen. It is divided into five main sections which are: When, Who, Navigation, Referrers and Others.
The other main section contains links to previous monthly reports from past years. Below you will find stats for the current year, which include visitors, pages, hits and bandwidths. On the top the last update date is shown. Under this date you can see the Reported period menu from where you can choose the month and the year you want to have information about.
The Summary column represents a quick summary of your site’s traffic statistics. It shows the number of unique visitors to your site. A unique visitor is a new visitor who comes to the site for the first time. The higher the number in the Unique visitors section is, the better – this means that more and more new people are attracted to your site.
Pages are the URLs that have received most traffic. Here you can see which are the most visited parts of your website and direct your attention there – improve navigation, add links to other pages, advertise, etc.
Hits are the total number of requests made to the server for your website during a given time period. The last graph, Bandwidth, measures the visitor-consumed bandwidth. Visits from robots and crawlers employed by search engines and HTTP error pages are not included in the bandwidth section.
Monthly history is the place where you can see the statistic information regarding Unique visitors, Number of visits, Pages, Hits and Bandwidth for each month of the year.
Days of month is almost the same section as the previous one but here the statistic information concerns all the days in each month of the year.
The Days of week section gives you information about Pages, Hits and Bandwidth as per the days of the current week.
Hours – here you can find Pages, Hits and Bandwidth statistics for each hours of the day.
In our next post, I will cover the rest of the AwStats sections, so stay tuned!
Originally published Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 10:10 am, updated September 29, 2009 and is filed under cPanel Support.
Tags: web hosting, cPanel, cPanel control panel, FTP, MySQL, keywords, AwStats