Understanding referrals in awstats

March 30, 2009 5:59 PM

In awstats, what are these unlabeled columns under referrals?

In awstats, the "connect to site from" section contains two columns of numbers. For most referrers, these numbers are the same, but for some, the second column contains a higher number.

I do not believe these columns represent pageviews vs. hits or similar, because the numbers are usually the same in both columns.

I've checked the documentation and searched Google but have not been able to find an answer. Any insight is appreciated.

posted by brassafrax to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I'm pretty sure it is pages vs. hits. When I review our reports, this seems to bear out. Also, when you click "Full list" is shows the same columns an labels them as such.
posted by advicepig at 6:19 PM on March 30

Could you give an example? This is usually part of the HTTP header sent by a browser, as explained on this page:

The Referer[sic] request-header field allows the client to specify, for the server's benefit, the address (URI) of the resource from which the Request-URI was obtained (the "referrer", although the header field is misspelled.) The Referer request-header allows a server to generate lists of back-links to resources for interest, logging, optimized caching, etc. It also allows obsolete or mistyped links to be traced for maintenance. The Referer field MUST NOT be sent if the Request-URI was obtained from a source that does not have its own URI, such as input from the user keyboard.

For a concrete example put a link in your profile to your page. When clicked, your awstats should show a metafilter URL in the referer section.
posted by odinsdream at 6:20 PM on March 30

It's true that on the "full list" page there are labeled columns called "pages" and "hits." What I don't understand is why these two columns contain exactly the same numbers, with very few exceptions.

This is a small but fully functional e-commerce website. My stats summary indicates that each page view generates many hits -- I get tens of thousands of hits compared to only thousands of page views, just as one would expect.

My question is why, under the referrals section, I have two columns of numbers which are for the most part the same. If these columns are really pages and hits, then they should not contain the same numbers.

I'm basically looking at something like this:

Google 620 760
websitea.com 51 51
websiteb.com 35 35
websitec.com 20 20

Add it all up, and my totals in the referrers section simply do not match the general stats that awstats reports.

The best explanation that I have is that the sites for which the columns differ tend to be sites that may be crawling my site (such as Google), so I'm wondering if these columns could be the difference between browser views and robots. Would love a definitive answer.
posted by brassafrax at 7:05 PM on March 30

The first thing you must learn is that there are no definitive answers in web stats. We'd love to think that we can measure every last thing, but in any analysis, you have to make some trade offs.

The next part you need to understand is that the referer is attached to the initial request to your site. So if I was at Google and clicked a link for yoursite.com/page_a.php that would show up in the logs as the referer for page_a.php . You'd also get a bunch of hits for the images and stylesheets and whatever, but those wouldn't have a referer from Google.

Where you get the occasional difference is when someone follows a link to something other than a page. So if I were to follow a link for yousite.com/fuzzybunny.jpg , without page to go with it, that would appear in the log as a referer to an image and be counted by awstats as a hit and not a page. Most of the time, people aren't going around linking to non-pages, but it happens now and then, but probably not enough on your site to show up in the stats. When I ran the web site for an art museum, we certainly had people linking directly to images without asking for pages.

I don't remember if awstats counts pdfs as pages or hits.
posted by advicepig at 7:21 PM on March 30

I'm well aware that these metrics are not 100% reliable.

Knowing that the initial request is the only hit attached to these figures answers the question of why my hits from referrers don't vastly outweigh my views from referrers as I had expected. Thanks!
posted by brassafrax at 7:37 PM on March 30