InternetOfficer.com

Connect to site from

Did you already try to decrypt the “Connect to site from” report in AWStats ?

Strangely enough, you should not conclude from our example that 47.6% of the visitors came from search engines and that 45.5% of them directly entered the address in the address bar. This section of the AWStats report is technically very correct, but it is not intuitive.

Most AWStats users look at “Connect to site from“, when they want to know from where their visitors are coming, but it is impossible to find out with the figures in the report.

A part of the problem is that AWStats counts a referrer for each hit on a file, while you probably expect to get a unique origin for each visit. On top of that, “Direct address / Bookmarks” also includes the hits from browsers with hidden referrers. To make things even more obscure, AWStats reports do not show the number of internal referrers (same web domain).

Origin of a visit

From a marketing prospective, all what we want to know is “Which web sites are sending us visitors ?” That is exactly what our AWStats Special Edition shows.

What is the difference between this report and the usual AWStats report ? In our report, all figures represent numbers of visits. For each visit, we only record the first referrer, the important one, the one that shows from where the visitor is coming. We see here that 65.6% of the visitors come from search engines and that 22.8% of them directly enter the address or hide the referrer.

Our report includes an “Internal referrer (restarting an old visit)” line that shows visitors who became active again after an inactive period of about one hour. AWStats defines a visit as a set of hits from the same visitor with less than 60 minutes between two successive hits. When a visitor clicks a new link within the web site after more than an hour, AWStats counts a new visit from the same visitor.

License

AWStats Special Edition (release 6.6.03b) is freely available for download.

Download

AWStats Special Edition (release 6.6.03b) is based on AWStats 6.6. If you use an older version of AWStats, you need to upgrade to AWStats 6.6 before installing our software.

Please read the license terms above before you download AWStats Special Edition (release 6.6.03b). Referrers must be enabled in your browser to download our program.

Installation

First make a backup copy of the existing awstats.pl file.

Once the download is done, unzip the downloaded file. Copy the awstats.pl from our .zip package in the place of the existing awstats.pl of your web server. That’s all!

At this point, AWStats Special Edition (release 6.6.03b) is installed and ready. The new referrer section will appear in your next AWStats report.

Two upgraded language files (English and French) are included in the .zip package. They can be used as examples for other languages.

100% AWStats Compatible

We aim at being 100% AWStats compatible. Even the usual AWStats “Connect to site from” section is still available in the report.

We checked the software as much as we could, but it is always possible that we overlooked some compatibility issues. Please let us know if you obtain unexpected results.

Would you wish to uninstall AWStats Special Edition, just replace our version of awstats.pl by the version from your original AWStats software.