Is Google analytics accurate?

[nathan76]

I see huge difference in Google Analytics traffic statistics and information provided by my host service. What's their reputation on that?

[mani]

trust on the information provided by your Host :) i usually like AwStats , it tell everything and quickly... however Google analytics have its own advantages but it does not give me accurate visitor counting but it helps me to find out the search queries, visitor location, timing etc....

[prilep]

Yeah i don't think you should use google for traffic, but to see where the visitors come from how long they stay etc. its great! But if you would like to view how much traffic you get you should look at awstats.

- Prilep :)

[Mong]

For basic info -- of course go with host's data
but for tracking and analyzing -- analytics is way good than others. :)

[adnan]

I see huge difference in Google Analytics traffic statistics and information provided by my host service. What's their reputation on that?


I think google analytics is GREAT.

Alot of the analytics reporting tools count and show hits as visitors which is not really the case.

Some tools will show you getting 25,000 visitors a day and google analytics will give u a surprisingly accurate figure of 150 visitors.

Plus you can filter out your own visits and robots visits are not shown so you will pretty much get accurate data from them.

[oseymour]

my hosting company is 1and1 and I can tell you that their stats are way off.....they count spiders as unique visitors.....

i didn't realize this until I found out some spider ip addresses and analyzed my raw logs myself...

I'm saying none is 100% accurate....I use statcounter and analytics...and even those two program stats can be way off sometimes.

[Bestmiler]

Aside from AWStats (which I'm having trouble downloading), are there any other traffic programs?

[FikseGTS]

you'll get more accurate raw stats, visitors/pageviews from programs that look at your actual logs.... google needs javascript to track your visitors.... this has its advantages, but some people don't have javascript on, and google will not track them....


I see huge difference in Google Analytics traffic statistics and information provided by my host service. What's their reputation on that?

[ravianz]

analytics and awstats both give almost similar results

[Pierce]

you can add analytics to ajax pages too.

very handy for tracking downloads of files from your site,

also analytics requries javascript, so it wont count any users who dont have javascript and who block the server via the hosts file.

Pierce

[adnan]

I think analytics has an option to parse and generate stats from your log files, for people concerned bout not being able to count traffic from NoN Javascript enabled browsers.

But I think that is not even 1% of the viewers, so I just go with the clean javascript type.