Webalizer vs Awstats - difference in unique visitors
 

I'm wondering if someone can explain to me the difference between unique visitors as calculated by webalizer vs those calculated by awstats.

Both programs are reading from the same logs.

On 3 different sites, I'm getting these numbers on average daily visits

awstats/webalizer

259/353

470/825

551/766

These are all wordpress sites, if that matters.

For webalizer I'm using the yellow "visits" number. For awstats I'm using the yellow "visits" number also.

Which of these numbers is the right one in terms of eyeballs on my sites each day?

If your selling your site, the higher number is correct... :1orglaugh

I left webalizer long time ago, far too simple an inaccurate, and eventually got a "clone" of awstats custom coded. Find the awstats documentation - there are detailed info on how they count uniques and so on.

the general concensus is awstat is RELATIVELY better compared to webalizer. i haven't seen anyone using webalizer figures for promoting their sites.

I wonder if maybe webalizer counts the bots and whatnot as visits and that's why the count is higher?

Or maybe awstats uses 30 day uniques and webalizer resets daily or something.

depends entirely on how you configure each piece of software.

Webalizer counts a "visit" as an IP seen in X period of time. I believe 8 hours is the default for this? I could be mistaken.

That means, if I load your site at noon, and then at 9pm, I am counted as two "visits". This makes logical sense to me, at least. To calculate visits from log files, you have to have an arbitrary cutoff of "how long of a period of inactivity re-sets the "visit" counter for this IP?"

I would assume AWStats has a similar setting. Make sure these both match, and re-run stats. If they are not within a couple visits of eachother, then obviously one or the other (or both) is calculating wrong :)

-Phil

yeah, use awstats here.

Use neither.. Just guestimate.

Think awstats doesnt count google spiders etc as UV... Could be mistaken though.

I think you right, at least it´s what I realized with webalizer and my wordpress sites, I think it counts bots, but I am not really sure...

it's hard to say, add GA and statcounter to pages, see what you get then.