CPanel Web Stats

How reliable are the statistics that are given to you about, how many visitors, hits your page has/had, from CPanel ?

They’re perfectly reliable as they are merely a report of what was in your server’s access logs, which log every request to the web server.

That doesn’t mean they’re particularly useful. Spiders, scrapers and other types of bots make requests, so your stats will include those. The only way the analyzer can tell one “visit” from a page view is looking at the IP address and maybe user agents, so it’s not going to do well at differentiating people behind a proxy, for one.

The bigger issue is why you are looking at these stats in the first place. The “hits” number is going to be perfectly accurate, but what useful information does this tell you? That someone downloaded an image from your site 2 million times, generating 2 million “hits”, doesn’t mean your site is doing well or doing poorly.

They’re vanity metrics. Big numbers make you happy, but they don’t let you do anything to improve your site. Especially when even trends are made worthless – if you redesign your site so that it includes more images and more scripts, your hits count will skyrocket even if your traffic drops!

Is there a way to get true stats ?

First, you’d have to define true.

But with any definition, the answer is going to be no.

Luckily, what we have is good enough for any of the useful uses of web stats. You don’t need to know exactly how many people visited your site this month to identify pages with a high bounce rate that need improvement, for example.

No. The stats are only useful when you compare stats from the same source over time. Having stats from a particular program say that you got X unique page views while another stats program says over the same period that you got Y unique pageviews tells you nothing by itself. If you look at those same stats programs a month later and see that one now says you got X+a pageviews and the other says you got Y+b pageviews gives you an indication that the number of visitors to your site is growing and if you continue to make similar comparisons then the rate at which your number of visitors is growing may also be derived from looking at how the figures are changing.

That doesn’t mean that any of the figures you are looking at are giving you an accurate number of pageviews, just that every time you look at the figures the inaccuracy should be roughly the same since each uses fixed rules in guessing what the number of pageviews is and so the changes in the numbers over time will provide you with some information even though the individual figures themselves are meaningless.

Any stats based off server logs will exclude anyone reading a cached copy from their count. Any stats that works from JavaScript embedded in the web page will exclude anyone with JavaScript turned off. Any stats that distinguishes visitors based on IP address will count the same person twice if their IP address changes between visits and may count the 100 people who all work at the same company as one visitor because they all use the same IP address. Any stats that use cookies to try to distinguish between visitors will count the same person multiple times if they disallow cookies.

I understand, it can be hard to distinguish :slight_smile:

Cpanel Web stats are completely trust-able, you can surely refer it and plan your decision accordingly

Alright, thank you everyone :slight_smile: