stats

[simeon]

Just noticed that awstats & webalizer report vastly different results.

On one of our clients sites webalizer reports 3599 total visits for September, whereas Awstats reports 1580.

Which one would be more accurate, what might be the difference between them?

Thanks.

Simon

[gands]

I think Webalizer reports all visits, whether successful or not, whereas AWStats splits them between successful and unsuccessful visits. You may be seeing the successful ones. I notice that you really have to pay attention to what you're reading in AWStats because it's much more detailed. I still prefer Webalizer.

[simeon]

Yes, I can see AWstats has traffic viewed and traffic not viewed.

Still, comparing with webalizer though, the numbers just don't seem to make sense.

Here's AWStats for Sept

Unique Visitors: 941
Number of visits: 1580
Pages: 11863 + 6271 (viewed + not viewed)
Hits: 54378 + 6793

Webalizer for Sept

Visits: 3599
Pages: 13473
Hits: 61795

I've got a client asking which they should be looking at, and I'm not sure what to tell them.

Simon

[gands]

I think this answers why there's a difference:
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/aws ... NT_RESULTS

Basically, it says AWStats and Webalizer interpret the raw data differently. This can be said for all web statistics programs. The raw data file is the final say and can be downloaded in cpanel, but it's not human friendly, so you'd need an analyzing program to interpret. Again, any two analyzing programs will interpret differently.

I worry less about the actual numbers and more about the trends, though.