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I've made a few changes to my site-specific config for Awstats, namely SkipHosts and SkipFiles.

I've had a dig around the manual, but it's unclear: what do I actually need to do for the updates to take effect?

Also, whilst I'm making changes... Anyone got any idea what causes the huge disparity between what awstats reports and what Google Analytics reports? Both are filtered in the same way. For example, a site I'm working on: Analytics reports 10k impressions in a day, Awstats 49k impressions in the same day.

Dan
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    Possibly ad/tracking blocking. For example, I have seen people blocking their browser from going to analytics sites... – ETL Feb 24 '14 at 03:59

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The configuration changes won't take effect on your data in the past. If you want to apply the changes to the data in the past, you have to reprocess all your log files.

The disparity between Google Analytics and AWStats is likely due to non-human traffic that does not run JavaScript scripts, and therefore Analytics gets no information on those visits. AWStats has a list of some bot users, but the list is not comprehensive, therefore bots are counted as real visitors.

Tero Kilkanen
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  • Are there any recommended methods (a plugin?) to improve the accuracy of Awstats? – Dan Feb 24 '14 at 07:18
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    I don't think there is any good plugin method to improve the accuracy. Basically the web server would need to detect client Javascript capabilities in order to get the same precision as Google Analytics, and this is not possible. Otherwise you would need to have a comprehensive list of bot user agents to exclude. And even then you wouldn't reach the same precision as Google Analytics, since some bots use browser user agents. – Tero Kilkanen Feb 24 '14 at 09:02
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You don't need to do anything besides changing the configuration file(s). A cron job runs regularly (typically every hour), reads the Awstats configuration, and parses the Apache logs to update the Awstats database. So any changes you make will take effect at the next run.

I'm not sure what causes the big difference you're seeing between Awstats and Google Analytics, but it sure sounds as though some different filters are at work.

Andrew Schulman
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"Analytics reports 10k impressions in a day, Awstats 49k impressions in the same day." Perhaps also your server is misused by some ackers, as is mine? See my question Misuse of the statistics script of Plesk?

Take a look at the raw log files. I see many entries for a GET request on Index.html with referers from spam/malware/hackz sites.

Community
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Bernhard Hiller
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  • Any strings you'd suggest I look for as a cursory search? :) – Dan Feb 24 '14 at 18:05
  • GET requests to awstats.pl?framename=mainright&output=refererpages or GET requests to any page (typically index.html) without any further requests for the images etc. on that page (note: can be OK when they are in the browser cache) – Bernhard Hiller Feb 25 '14 at 10:03