Over the number of years i have found that Google actually misses some genuine traffic and does not include it on your analytics page. This is just a post really to see what others think about the true stats i personally think google is a bit misleading - but i cant grumble it is free. Please give me your thoughts.....
I know that google cuts out all the spiders and robots to try and leave you true stats but i dont think this works also awstats includes everything so i dont think this would be any good either lol
My analytics stats seem to be in "general" agreement with awstats. Be sure to use a Filter to eliminate your own IP address also.
No tool will ever be 100% 'accurate'. They use particular technologies to track particular things - first off you have to know what it they are recording - some packages record pageviews, some record hits to the server. Then , there's user behaviour that affects results - use of proxies, firewalls, deleting cookies, turning off javascript - they can all affect how a tracking package behaves.
Yes i agree with you, but there is no other way to check the Analytics (Free Analytics), compare to other analytics, Google Analytics give the more information...!
Use woopra.com, statcounter, AWstats in place of google analytics. well its good for me. I always use GA to know the status of my website.
Google Analytics uses javascript. This means most spiders aren't included because they don't read it. Also, it means anyone who doesn't have javascript enabled (or have something like noscript installed) they won't be counted. Furthermore, Google Analytics is sometimes laggy or doesn't load all the way by the time your visitors leave the page. This will also cause inaccurate numbers.
I've been so far very happy with Google analytics. It's quite accurate and very in depth. Other ones tend to only give you summaries and brief shallow looks into your website statistics in my limited experience.
as far as i could see analytics tells me about anything i need to know about my traffic, apart from the visitors names ). quite pleased by it.
The newer Analytics code that they now default to (as of last week) should be a lot better at tracking quick page loads than the older code (not the urchin code). It seems to collect the stats data before the page loads and allows you to collect data into multiple profiles on the same connection but still allows the page to load quickly. Won't capture really quick page loads and page changes, but should be more accurate than most. One thing that will change on a per stats basis is the number of unique visitors (or whatever the various stats call it) as that to a large degree is a guess. Analytics might be slightly better at guessing it especially if you have it on an exit page, but most other stuff should be pretty much the same. At least going by our server stats analysed by Analog and the Analytics stats compared. Trev
well in my opinion tools are just tools so we can't belive in anyone out there ... but the best thing is take some of the best visitors data providers and then choose one whom ya think is best .. I use google cuz google is best in all
Other things to notice is that the data that comes from google analytics is somewhat very deep and you can learn things like what works and whats don't. This can help you with all your SEO needs or even Paid campaign for particular site or blogs of yours.
I know google analytics misses out some good traffic records - I drive traffic to people's websites and my analytics state that the traffic is sent but google analytics miss out several impressions.
Analtics is not perfect but I don't think that any are. I would not worry about it that much as long as it is pretty good. I normally ad quantcast so I can check demographic information about once a month.
Use awstats a an additional traking tool. It consumes more bandwidth though. For the not too serious about the detailed traffic analysis, Google Analytics would work just fine.