AW Stats is a very simple analytics tracker, so if you’re just looking for basic information about visitor numbers to your site, it’s an easy reference point. Whether Google Analytics may be a better option for you is covered at the bottom of this article!
AW stats consists of a graph and tables with different numbers so you can see basic metrics. You don’t need to install it or set anything up; that’s automatically done for you when your site is created or moved to us, so you have data for as far back as you’ve been hosted with us.
To access AW Stats:
- Log into LyricalCP (if you've never logged in before, you'll need to set up a user first, which you can do here: How do I log into LyricalCP?
- Scroll down to the bottom of the control panel and click the "AWStats" icon.
From here you can see some stats about your website visitors, which are explained in more detail below. You can set the duration for the data you want to currently view (for example, if you want to just look at one specific month) at the top of the screen.
Month - This column in the table shows the month and year the data refers to. The current month will show incomplete numbers, future months will show 0 or a blank space.
Unique visitors - How many different people visited your site (broadly speaking, the same person visiting twice would be counted as 1 visit). This is determined by IP address.
Number of visits - How many visits your website had in total from all visitors during this time period (broadly speaking, the same person visiting twice would be counted as 2 visits).
Pages - How many times pages on your site were viewed by visitors.
Hits - The total number of “data chunks” used by visitors (e.g. a page containing text and a graphic counts as two hits).
Bandwidth - How much data your visitors used while visiting your website (bandwidth is consumed by visitors browsing your site, and the amount depends on the size of your pages and how many visitors and visits you get. For example, a visitor viewing a page with a video on it will use more bandwidth than a visitor viewing a page that’s just plain text).
Viewed traffic - These are real people visiting your site.
Not viewed traffic - These are typically robots, including Googlebot, Pinterest’s crawler, etc.
Other things to note
AWStats contains other data you may find useful, such as what days of the week and hours of the day you get the most visitors, the top ten countries people visit from, the most common robots and spiders, how long visits last, the top visited pages, the most used browsers, operating systems and screen sizes, and the top search keywords they used to find your site.
AW Stats updates in a 24 hour cycle, so it doesn’t show you real-time data or visitors currently on your website. For real-time visits you’ll want to use something like Google Analytics or a paid site recording service such as HotJar or Lucky Orange.
AW Stats isn’t considered as advanced or accurate as Google Analytics, but it’s good for general numbers and cross-referencing with Google Analytics.
Should I use AWStats or Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is considered the industry standard analytics tracker, so if you think you may work with brands or ad networks, or sell your website in the future, you’ll want to have Google Analytics installed and running even if you don’t plan to check it yourself. It only starts collecting data from when it’s set up, so it’s best to get it set up sooner rather than later.
To install Google Analytics, check out this support article: How To Set Up Google Analytics For Your WordPress Website.
AWStats can also be cross-referenced with other analytics software, including Google Analytics, to sense check or confirm what you’re seeing. For example, if your Google Analytics traffic suddenly drops off a cliff, but your AWStats is still looking pretty consistent, it’s more likely that there’s a problem with your Google Analytics tracking itself rather than that your visitor numbers have tanked. If you need help setting up Google Analytics or have any questions about using it or AWStats, please create a support ticket.
