Hello everyone. I was just checking my stats on Google analytics, and then for "fun" checked back over with awstats. Seriously analytics says eg. 700 and awestats says 2000!! Which one is true? If I compare my bandwidth usage with the bumber awstats shows, awstats shows the correct number, and doing a bit of math it could easily be right. However, can it really be that analytics is so "incorrect"? I remember running another site, and it was the same. two different numbers. some of the days however the days are similar. I'm wondering why this is. I find it a bit odd. Anyway has an opinion or experience with this? Would be really grateful for any input. Thx
I think you need to post google analytic code on each page. Probably you put code only on home page. Otherwise thier should not be that much difference.
awstats gets its numbers from your server logs, google does not. awstats will also pick up people leaching your graphics, 301's 302's 404's etc, also spiders among other things, depending how you have it set up. (mine also picks up blink.digitalpoint.com for instance, the keyword tracker script) awstats will thus nearly always show a higher number. Google analytics is via java and many people do not have it enabled for 3rd party scripts, plus it should not normally pick up spiders, non html output etc.
It is better to use your own stats script rather than Google analytics... To get better results with Google analytics try pasting the code at top of your website and not at the bottom as sometimes user may navigate to another page even before the page has loaded...
Why do you say that? Certainly Google Analytics gives a lower number, but for the reasons mentioned by vagrant, I believe Google Analytics gives a more honest record of the number of "human" hits my site has received and therefore IMHO Google Analytics is better. Whichever you decide to use, there will be differences in the way the data is collected. You need to understand the differences and interpret the numbers accordingly.
I agree Personally i think addfreestats . com give me easier to understand information (and more for my non adword sites), and now do a free invisible tracker as well.
It depends on how you want to interpret the data. In my case, I would prefer Analytics because the cookie tracking is likely more accurate and it only start counting once the page is loaded as opposed to Awstats which already start the count when any file on the server is accessed.
I think the real traffic is somewhere between these too. If awstats tell you that the site had 2k uniques and analytics show only 700 visitors, maybe there where 1.2-1.5k uniques on your website.