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Old 2006-03-30, 01:51 PM   #15
kbbq
I'm going to the backseat of my car with the woman I love, and I won't be back for TEN MINUTES
 
Join Date: Jun 2004
Posts: 86
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be careful of awstats and what they tell you. My awstats we off by 1000%. yes.. no typo. ONE THOUSAND percent. You want to double check your awstats with perhaps an invisible counter. Details after my point on how i found out

With that in mind. My point is that I would be very careful on making any marketing / site changes based on stats retrieved from awstats until you have made sure that your awstats are trustworthy. Mine weren't so I switched to trusting google analytics for all my stats.





Now details.

My front page has a size of 100KB. I was tailing my access logs one day and noticed that I was getting a lot of hits requesting only 10k-30k. That's not even a third of the page that they are requesting. In short, a lot of weird bogus hits were coming, but awstats still counted them as valid page views. In awstats, there's a column that says Average Page Size. My average page size request was 60k. which doesn't make any sense. So i did an audit by putting on 3 page counters on my home page.

1) Google Analytics
2) Master Stats
3) Stat Counter

All 3 of those gave me stats within 5% of each other. Awstats was 1000% off.

So... yeah.... it sucks because i love awstats, especially since i got the stupid geoip plugin setup too.
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KBBQ
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