AWStats is not an accurate reflection of a websites traffic

In the past, we have used AWStats as a way to compare with other Victorian-based local news sites. We were wrong and misleading the public by doing so and apologise.

Thanks to an IT expert and amateur radio operator, we have been shown that this information is highly inaccurate and can easily be manipulated by the site owner, by clicking on their site again and again for example.

For example, the table below shows AWStats vs Google Analytics vs JetPack for January 2023. This website VicNews was not available from January 1 to 31, 2023 as the site had been closed to the public and was only available to the author of this article.

As can be seen from the table, VicNews was down all of January 2023, not accessible to the public and the only user/hit/viewer was the author of this article. As can be seen from this table, we did not have a single visitor or viewer other than ourselves, but AWStats does not reflect this.

As such we have removed past articles using AWStats to compare with other media sites from VicNews.

AWStats is for website administration data, not how many actual ‘viewers’ ‘sessions’ or ‘traffic’ a website has. However, AWStats is a useful tool for website administration, such as determining how many ‘404 Page not found’ errors are being served by the server.

It should be noted that ‘hits’ on 404 pages still show as web traffic on AWStats. They don’t with Google Analytics.

VicNews will only use Google Analytics data, which is sent via WordPress’ jetpack plugin for our site data.

In short, AWStats is a cPanel tool that enables you to track the visits to a certain website.

Visits are grouped in months, days and hours as this allows easy noticing whether the bandwidth is increasing or not. The tool provides detailed information about the users – IP address, browser, where the user comes from and others. AWStats can be accessed in cPanel » AWStats.

In summary, any website using AWStats data to claim ‘readership’ or ‘viewers’ is at least misleading. For example, the typing of this article is included as a view and a session.

Our use of the WP Admin area when maintaining this site is counted as a ‘view’ and ‘visitor’ by AWStats. It isn’t counted by Google Analytics.

Google Analytics (or WordPress Stats via jetpack) does not count the site administrators or activities, (such as coding work) or the typing of this article. AWStats does.

AWStats is the right tool for you if are looking for answers of questions like:

• Is your website crawled by bots and which are they?
• What IP addresses increase the bandwidth/number of visits the most?
• Which resource from your website loads most often and how many hits it has?
• Which are the most frequently loaded types of files and the most downloaded resources from your website?
• How much bandwidth (MB,GB) is generated by visitors?
• What error messages does the website return?
• Are there missing resources that return an error 404?
• Is there hotlinking to your website’s resources?
• How to use AWStats for analyzing the CPU time used?

Google Analytics is the right tool for you if are looking for answers of questions like:

• How many unique visitors your website has per day/week/month?
• Where do users come from and what do they do on the website?
• What are the keywords which lead visitors to your website and checkout/target success?
• Can I track real-time visitors on the website? How many visitors are currently online, did they visit the website from mobile or desktop, which are the main pages they viewed?
• Which are the sources of bandwidth to the website – direct and organic bandwidth, visits from referral websites, paid search, social network bandwidth, email campaigns, etc.?
• How to track consumer behaviour on the website and the way consumers interact with the website’s content?
• What is the percentage of the visits which led to a checkout/target success for a specific period?
• Can I track a visitor viewing the website’s different domains?
• Can I get detailed reports? Can I get my reports by email?
• I own a news media site – How to make my first steps with Google Analytics?

If you really want to know a website’s ‘real world’ viewers – say to make a ‘value for money assessment’, such as “how many eyeballs will my ad be seen by” decision – then don’t use AWStats data. Ask For Google Analytics data.

Again, VicNews apologises for using AWStats data for comparison with other news media sites in the past.