AWStats will show you stats on visitors to your website based on time (broken down by month, week, day or hour), country of origin (by country, region, and city), robot visits (including ones to your robot.txt file), the duration of visits, browsers used to reach your site, etc. Many of the statistics will not impact your pay-per-click ad campaign decisions necessarily, but some are very informative, such as the URL from which your visitors originated (to check on the effectiveness of specific ad campaigns), the keywords or phrases used to reach your website, and incidents of repeated short visits by the same IP address, usually a fairly clear indication of click fraud.

AWStats can even be used if you do not have access to your log files by integrating commands that will create artificial log files that you can access and that AWStats can analyze to provide you with the stats you need. Check out the FAQs section of AWStats if you are in this position.

Although not for the timid, AWStats can be an extremely useful way for you to double or triple check that the stats you are receiving from your paid web analytics program or the analytics provided by your search engine as part of your ad campaign are relatively in sync. Remember that the two, or three, will never match completely, due to different factors, but they should generally show similar results. If not, it’s time to check things out. If you are well versed in log file composition, AWStats may be the tool for you to do so. Otherwise, other options are probably best if you suspect a problem.