Only recently did I learn what AWStats are. AWStats are a free reporting tool that analyzes traffic to a website, or blog. It records the number of visits to your site, the number of unique visitors, the “hits” and “pages” numbers and gives you charts of very detailed information about these visitors.

Since I use Bluehost as my hosting server, I find the AWStats under the “Stats/Logs” section of the CPanel. Remember to go to “Stats Manager” page and enable the stats for your site. After the stats are enabled, then click on “Web/FTP Stats” and it will give you a list of options. Click on the “Awstats” and you’ll see the results of the traffic to your site. Since I have two sites, I also click on “Subdomain stats”. The stats are usually updated daily.

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I like looking at the “visits duration” section, as this tells you how long a visitor spent on your site. It tells you that you had “x” numbers of visitors, for an average of “x” s (or seconds). If you divide the seconds by 60, that will give you the average number of minutes spent on your site. If you see a high number after the “0s-30s”, this indicates that a visitor probably just clicked on your site, didn’t see what they were looking for, and clicked off. My goal is to reduce that number, but I haven’t figured out what a good percentage would be. I’m happy to see some visitors spending more time on my site, as hopefully they are gaining some information from what I’ve written.

Stats are fun to see, however, at this point in time, I’m not going to get too hung up on them. Some days my stats are discouraging, but I’m not going to let them affect my attitude about blogging. After all, they’re just numbers. I rate my blog on how much value I can pass onto others.