Advanced web statistics

Web > Advanced Statistics reports traffic for the space’s hosted websites — visits, pages, referrers and the rest — generated from the web server’s own logs.

What it is good for

Server-log statistics answer questions client-side analytics cannot:

• Bandwidth actually consumed, which is what a hosting quota measures
• Requests that never reached a browser — bots, scrapers, and attempts against paths that do not exist
• Traffic during an outage, when no client-side script was running to report it

This is the screen for a bandwidth dispute

When a customer questions a bandwidth overage, log statistics are the evidence. Analytics that run in the visitor’s browser cannot see most of what consumes bandwidth — file downloads, bots, and hotlinked images among them.

What it is not

These numbers will not match Google Analytics, and neither is wrong

Log statistics count requests to the server. Browser analytics count script executions in a visitor’s browser. They measure different things and always disagree, usually with the server number substantially higher.

Neither is broken. If a customer compares the two and asks which is right, the answer is “both, of different questions” — log statistics for bandwidth and infrastructure, browser analytics for human visitor behaviour.

Bot traffic in particular inflates log-based visitor counts, which is why they are a poor basis for a marketing conversation and a good one for a capacity conversation.

Availability

Advanced Statistics appears when the hosting plan provisions a statistics service. Where it is absent, the plan does not include one.

Related

• Websites
• Hosting plans — where the bandwidth quota is set

Installation

Advanced Statistics Installation is the screen that puts the statistics package onto a site. Statistics are not retrospective — a site produces analysis from the point it is installed, so installing it after a traffic event you wanted to understand gives you nothing about that event.