Google Analytics provides decent functionality and data, but how much more value is there when compared to a log file analysis tool like AWstats and what are the benefits or using one versus the other?

AWstats

AWstats (Advanced Web Statistics) is an open source log analyzer written in Perl that can use a variety of log formats and runs on a variety of operating systems. AWstats was designed with the main purpose to inform system administrators rather than website business owners, web marketers and web analysts, which basically means that making sense of AWstats data for marketing/business purposes is not very straightforward. Moreover, the reports are extremely basic and just spit out raw data which doesn’t tell you an awful lot about the website dynamics and stats that matter to improve your efforts.

AWstats processes the log files that most web servers churn out by default and organizes the data in a bunch of basic reports. This tool was designed for the needs of “Way back when…” so it’ll be of limited use. One major difference between data collection methods of AWstats and GA, is that the first logs data on the physical webserver, whereas GA logs data on the site itself and stores the information in a remote location (on Google’s servers).

Should you compare figures of AWstats and GA like with like, you’ll notice that AWstats figures will be much larger. An important reason for this is the fact that AWstats detects search engine bots that access (“crawl”) your website to learn more about its content, link structure etc., whereas GA can’t detect this type of traffic. These days, crawl stats are far less important than back in the day, and information on how search engine bots see your website is readily available from the major search engines, once you sign up to look into these services. Examples are Google Webmaster tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer.

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There seems to be some uncertainty about how the Navigation Summary and Entrance Paths reports differ from each other in the data they represent. It’s actually quite straightforward: The Navigation Summary report shows you 1. Whether the page you’re analyzing is a popular landing page and how many visitors it manages to keep on your site and 2. Whether the page in question is a secondary conversion page that can be optimized to improve conversions. The Entrance Path report is intended to show you which pages are viewed after visitors enter your site on a particular landing page.

Working in tandem, a combination of these reports forms a good basis for landing page analysis in answering these questions, amongst others:

• How many visitors exit my site from my landing pages (bounce rate) and how many visit other pages, starting from the landing page?
• How important are my landing pages for my site’s conversion paths?
• Which pages are viewed after having entered my site on particular landing pages?
• Am I targeting the right keywords with my landing pages and do visitors think my landing page content is relevant to their search query?

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