AWStats Review
AWStats is an open source web statistics tool written in Perl that converts your log files into organized, and graphically represented data. It combines the data it collects into time-based chunks that are then converted into graphs. It collects normal data, such as: page hits, new visitors, bandwidth used, geographic location, and so on. It's most important piece of data in terms of web marketing is the collection of the most popular in-bound links. There is a lot of data that it collects and presents to you in an attractive way, but AWStats can have some drawbacks. It has been plagued by problems in the older versions, and many people who tried it before are afraid to go back. However, it has evolved over time into a program which might be able to take care of your needs without costing you a dime.
There was an old, glaring problem with AWStats: you could only see the data in terms of months, and that can put you at a huge disadvantage because it leaves you wondering what you did differently for that entire month. For example, if you release an e-book for sale on your website every week for a month, you'd have four or five e-books out there. What if they were all on different topics, and you had a huge boost in sales? You're stuck with a one out of five chance of guessing the popular topic. With AWStats alone, you could spend months figuring it out instead of making more money. The month-only problem has been fixed, so now you can see daily reports of your data.
Next up on the list are the security vulnerabilities. The Lupper Worm exploited a hole in AWStats to infect web servers. Investigating that hole led to more breaches of security which were unknown or thought to already be fixed. Security is being tightened up, and the developers are always moving towards a faster, better, more secure program. Although the developers are working on it, you should keep plugged into the community to see if any new breaches are found. Also, don't forget to report anything you notice to the community because if they don't find out about it, they can't help you fix it!
On the positive side, the AWStats administration interface is well laid out and looks good. It presents the data in a series of tables and graphs that are easy to follow and understand. That's something that shouldn't be discounted because some analytics and statistic software is ugly and difficult to use, and it makes you much less likely to go through the trouble of interpreting and applying the data.
For statistical information, AWStats works quite nicely, and there are improvements made to it all the time. In conjunction with the third-party plug-ins available for it, you can have a very in-depth view of your user-base. One of the inherent issues of using AWStats is that you host it on your own web server, so that means that you're responsible for installing it, updating it, and making sure that it's working properly. That's one of the major selling points of the analytics companies: we'll keep it working and keep adding features so you don't have to do it yourself. Of course, they take a huge chunk of change to hire, so AWStats' drawbacks seem small in comparison. Even if you are not superbly technically inclined, it's not too terribly difficult to get AWStats running, and it may serve your needs just as well as the analytics companies. The key is to keep an eye on security updates, get them quickly, and stay plugged into the community.
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