Jun
2007
Awstats Web Analytics: Awstats ExtraSections Examples
Azam in Free Scripts , Server Related Tips , Tutorials , Website Promotion No CommentsI’ve been using the free Awstats web analytics software for years on many of my domains (I use Google Analytics on some as well now, but the advantage of Awstats is its single page format, giving instant access to the data without lot’s of clicking about).
The other day, I decided my Awstats installation was overdue an update and popped over to SourceForge to pick up the latest version.
While I was looking over the docs to refresh my memory on the upgrade process, I came across a link to a page of Awstats ExtraSection examples on another website.
Awstats ExtraSections enable you to create your own special reports not provided by default with AWStats. I personally only started putting them in my domain configuration files a few years ago, and then only as a means of tracking clicks on exit and redirect links, etc.
It seemed much easier than having separate scripts to track clicks on my affiliate links, for example.
The AWStats Enhancements and Extensions page covers quite a bit more than that though, and provides copy and paste examples of the code to add.
Amongst others, there are modifications that enable you to see which keywords and phrases are bringing traffic from which search engines, what’s the most popular RSS reader accessing your feed, which pages the different search crawlers are visiting, the top downloads, basic clickstream analysis, and blocking spam referrers. All you need to do is add them in your Awstats config file and you’re away. I copied a few myself.
There’s also an example that shows you how easy it is to monitor particular pages, as well as lots of resource links for further reading.
If you’ve never used the Awstats ExtraSections this is the easiest way to get started. You can find a few more examples on Adding extra reports using the ExtraSection feature from the official Awstats docs.
