AWStats - eXTReMe Tracking - Totally different GEO tracking. Why??

Hi.

On one of my sites I have eXTReMe Tracking counter and in Cpanel also AWStats.

But for GEO tracking eXTReMe Tracking shows that 66% of traffic is from UK and 12% from USA. AWStats shows 65% for USA and 20% for UK.

I believe that more traffic for this site is from UK.

How is this possible?

 

I've noticed that AWStats tracks visitors by their browser (correct me if i'm wrong)

So if you are from India for example and you have an English/American version installed of IE, AWStats shows the country of origin from US
I can be wrong on this one but i noticed that in my stats

Didier

 

I think that it should track visitors by IP and also it is written that it tracks by IP.

This could be the possible reason, but like I said it should track by IP firstly.

But it is really very strange thing. :/

 

AWStats tracks visitors by IP and not by their browsers.

AWStats can use several methods to track visitors:

- default "old" method : based on the top level domain of the IP address of the visitor (common confusion between .com/.net/.org and USA-sites);

- GeoIP : GeoIP is an AWStats plugin that builds the country chart from an IP-country database;

- GeoIPfree : GeoIPfree is another AWStats plugin that builds the country chart from an IP-country database.

More details here : AWStats Documentation - Contrib and resource page

Jean-Luc

 

beyond that, if services do use ip -> country databases, it's possible that the databases are different, and may not be accurate.

another possible reason for differences:

frequently something that parses your apache logs is going to see more visitors, since bots will be logged-- even bots that don't download images or execute JS.

lots of reasons for differences in all statistics, not just location. even unique visitors, pageloads, etc can vary significantly from one service to another.

 

I agree that it can vary, but scripts that parse server logs should be the most accurate. But in my case it isn't so. :/

 

how are they not accurate? not accurate for location, or unique visitors, pageviews, etc?

for unique visitors:

some programs record "visits." as in sessions. if a user comes back after x amount of time, it counts as a new session.

others count each IP as one unique user, regardless of how often they come back.

regarding pageloads:

make sure both are configured correctly. if for whatever reason jpg was somehow listed under the definition of pages, you're going to see a lot more pageviews.

bottom line is: different software produces similar results, but there can be variation. logs are best used to compare your progress to your previous stats-- on that same statistics program.

 

I've heard from several sources that AW Stats is pretty innaccurate but unfortunately I am not able to link to any because I have forgotten them!

I've read it quite a few times various websites, though. Sorry I couldn't help you answer your question better.

 

I can get it pretty well, because there is only in geo location problem. You get IP from logs, now define the country, how can this vary so much?

 

What does the last line of your AWStats report say :
- version number ?
- plugins ?

Jean-Luc

 

Jean-Luc: Advanced Web Statistics 6.4 (build 1.814) - Created by awstats (plugins: geoipfree)

Thanks.

 

The differences you report can be related to differences (mistakes) in the ip<->country databases (in AWStats and/or in the other stats service). There are mistakes in all ip<->country databases (even in the one used by Microsoft in MSN Search).

Another source of differences is the fact that AWStats counts all visitors that it does not identify as a robot, while a JavaScript based stats server only counts the human visitors that use a browser with JavaScript enabled. So, it is possible that AWStats counts some robots as "visitors". If these robots hide they are robots and if they are operated from a computer in the USA and if they connect through several IP addresses, AWStats will erronously add a number of US-visitors. The JavaScript based stats server will not even report that these robots visit your site (even when they would eat 50% of your bandwidth).

You could check that by carefully looking at the list of hosts visiting your site (in the AWStats report).

To upgrade to the latest stable version of AWStats (6.5) would reduce the number of unrecognized robots.

Jean-Luc

 

because ip -> country is not a precise science. it's a guess. an educated guess, but a guess.

different sets of ip -> country databases may yield seperate results.

 

I use script that define country pretty accurate. So I think this is not problem at this kind of improtant scripts as AWStats.

Thanks for your help Jean-Luc, but I can't do anything, I can't even upgrade the script or whatever.

 

Sometimes, IPs don't give you accurate results. For instance, an IP that starts with 98 could very well be from an ISP based in the US but some IP databases could show that its from a completely different country like Spain or Australia. So it lal depends on how accurate the reporting is really.