{"id":1132,"date":"2018-09-24T17:28:13","date_gmt":"2018-09-24T16:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.orchidbox.com\/?p=1132"},"modified":"2024-04-21T08:26:35","modified_gmt":"2024-04-21T08:26:35","slug":"awstats-an-alternative-to-google-analytics-and-great-tool-to-diagnose-issue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orchidbox.com\/insights\/awstats-an-alternative-to-google-analytics-and-great-tool-to-diagnose-issue\/","title":{"rendered":"AWstats \u2013 An Alternative to Google Analytics and Great Tool to Diagnose Issue"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes Google Analytics doesn\u2019t quite fit your needs \u2013 it can slow your site down (due to too many JS calls), or you can find it simply isn\u2019t reliable enough.<\/p>\n<p>If you are looking for a FREE and easy to use server side analytics package that tracks basic stats like:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Number of visits, and number of unique visitors,<\/li>\n<li>Visits duration and last visits,<\/li>\n<li>Authenticated users, and last authenticated visits,<\/li>\n<li>Days of week and rush hours (pages, hits, KB for each hour and day of week),<\/li>\n<li>Domains\/countries of hosts visitors (pages, hits, KB, 269 domains\/countries detected, GeoIp detection),<\/li>\n<li>Hosts list, last visits and unresolved IP addresses list,<\/li>\n<li>Most viewed, entry and exit pages,<\/li>\n<li>Files type,<\/li>\n<li>Browsers used (pages, hits, KB for each browser, each version (Web, Wap, Media browsers: 97 browsers, more than 450 if using browsers_phone.pm library file),<\/li>\n<li>Search engines, keyphrases and keywords used to find your site<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>AWstats is what you need. AW Stats is basically a log analyser which works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains in few graphics and web pages.<\/p>\n<p>It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyse log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined\/XLF\/ELF log format or common\/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp server.<\/p>\n<p>More importantly AWstats gives you what Analytics will never be able to provide: Http error codes.<\/p>\n<p>As matter of fact Google Analytics can give you stats only on successfully returned pages (RC: 200); it is pretty much useless to diagnose 500 server errors, 404s and 403s.<\/p>\n<p>Furthermore there is a rumour in the SEO community that Google uses Google Analytics data (in particular Bounce Rate) to rate your site. The GA urban legend states that if you have got an high bounce rate you might get penalised. For this reason these believers don\u2019t use Google Analytics but AWstats instead.<\/p>\n<p>Other stats that Google Analytics can\u2019t provide:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Cluster report for load balanced servers ratio.<\/li>\n<li>Visits of robots (more than 300 robots detected),<\/li>\n<li>Worms attacks<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>GUIDE ON HOW TO INSTALL AWSTATS ON UBUNTU<\/h2>\n<p>sudo aptitude install awstats<br \/>\nTo see the country of your visitors (not required)<\/p>\n<p>sudo aptitude install libnet-ip-perl<br \/>\nsudo aptitude install libgeo-ipfree-perl<br \/>\nConfiguration<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s assume you want to analyse the Apache 2 log file of your website \u201csite.com\u201d (It can be just an IP address).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Create configuration file<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>sudo cp \/etc\/awstats\/awstats.conf \/etc\/awstats\/awstats.site.com.conf<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update these parameters<br \/>\n<\/strong><br \/>\n# apache2<br \/>\nLogFile=\u201d\/var\/log\/apache2\/access.log\u201d<\/p>\n<p># domain name<br \/>\nSiteDomain=\u201dsite.com\u201d<br \/>\nHostAliases=\u201dlocalhost 127.0.0.1 site.com\u201d<\/p>\n<p>LogFormat=1<br \/>\nYou can also activate these plugins<\/p>\n<p>LoadPlugin=\u201dtooltips<br \/>\nLoadPlugin=\u201dgeoipfree\u201d<br \/>\nRun<\/p>\n<p>sudo \/usr\/lib\/cgi-bin\/awstats.pl -config=site.com -update<\/p>\n<p>You should get something like this<\/p>\n<p>Create\/Update database for config \u201c\/etc\/awstats\/awstats.site.com.conf\u201d by AWStats version 6.7 (build 1.892)<br \/>\nFrom data in log file \u201c\/var\/log\/apache2\/access.log\u201d\u2026<br \/>\nPhase 1 : First bypass old records, searching new record\u2026<br \/>\nSearching new records from beginning of log file\u2026<br \/>\nPhase 2 : Now process new records (Flush history on disk after 20000 hosts)\u2026<br \/>\nJumped lines in file: 0<br \/>\nParsed lines in file: 191338<br \/>\nFound 0 dropped records,<br \/>\nFound 24 corrupted records,<br \/>\nFound 0 old records,<br \/>\nFound 191314 new qualified records.<br \/>\nConfigure Apache to view the statistics<\/p>\n<p><strong>Create \/etc\/apache2\/conf.d\/statistics<br \/>\n<\/strong><br \/>\nAlias \/awstatsclasses \u201c\/usr\/share\/awstats\/lib\/\u201d<br \/>\nAlias \/awstats-icon\/ \u201c\/usr\/share\/awstats\/icon\/\u201d<br \/>\nAlias \/awstatscss \u201c\/usr\/share\/doc\/awstats\/examples\/css\u201d<br \/>\nScriptAlias \/cgi-bin\/ \/usr\/lib\/cgi-bin\/<br \/>\nScriptAlias \/statistics\/ \/usr\/lib\/cgi-bin\/<br \/>\nOptions ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch<br \/>\nRestart Apache<\/p>\n<p>sudo \/etc\/init.d\/apache2 restart<\/p>\n<p><strong>View your statistics<br \/>\n<\/strong><br \/>\nhttps:\/\/site.com\/statistics\/awstats.pl<br \/>\nor (in case you have more than one config file)<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/site.com\/statistics\/awstats.pl?config=site.com<\/p>\n<p><strong>Disclaimer<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Orchid Box doesn\u2019t receive any money, freebies or any sort of payment from AWstats. This is a genuine recommendation from our agency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes Google Analytics doesn\u2019t quite fit your needs \u2013 it can slow your site down (due to too many JS calls), or you can find it simply isn\u2019t reliable enough. If you are looking for a FREE and easy to use server side analytics package that tracks basic stats like: Number of visits, and number [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1133,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tools"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>AWstats \u2013 An Alternative to Google Analytics and Great Tool to Diagnose Issue - Orchid Box Insights<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.orchidbox.com\/insights\/awstats-an-alternative-to-google-analytics-and-great-tool-to-diagnose-issue\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"AWstats \u2013 An Alternative to Google Analytics and Great Tool to Diagnose Issue - Orchid Box Insights\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sometimes Google Analytics doesn\u2019t quite fit your needs \u2013 it can slow your site down (due to too many JS calls), or you can find it simply isn\u2019t reliable enough. 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