I have been wondering the same thing since my Aweber stats are 3-4X my google analytics, active meter, and wordpress stats page results. Anyone know what I can trust?
You better trust Google Analytics because its technology is far more advanced than any tool in the industry today. Google itself is relying on its analytics software when it is doing market research and product development.
this is 3-4x defference, thats a lot. So basically awstat is not accurate at all. If it shows 400perday then its actually 100
i personally think google analytics is more accurate. i do like to check awstats to boost my ego but i believe it counts a lot of bots and web crawlers while GA does not.
I think that awstat is more reliable in this case. The script is installed in the server where your page is hosted. On the other hand Google Analytics is a code installed in the page, so if the visitor comes but the page has a problem loading the code, it will not count as a visit for Google but it will be a visit for Awstat.
I think google doesn't count secondary pages, so if some one lands on some other page its not counted.
I believe that if you have javascript off then google won't count it. Also, GA doesn't count spiders.
What about off-site services like Web-Stat, Stat-Counter or Host-Tracker? I've actually used Web stat and it seems to mirror the results I get from GA. I also like it's detailed visitor report. It's strange that something like statistics could be so across the board, I mean, the actual stat-log is the same isn't it?
I would trust awstats. It reads directly from your web logs while Google relies on JS. What happens if the visitor has JS disabled, or is using a hosts file that blocks analytics? They do not get tracked. These same visitors, though, do get tracked by Awstats as they appear in the server logs. I personally use awstats for all of my sites for this reason.
awstat is more accurate that google analytics. Google analytics always shows half of the traffic in awstats.
I'm coming to this conclustion too, I ran a yahoo ppc, and it shows 10 click ppc and on anaytic it shows 6
So I made some changes in analytics and where my link is placed on my blog and site. My numbers exploded. It is still lower than awstats, probably the google thing, but it will be interesting to track this now that the change is made. Play with where your code is on the pages, may help you too.
I don't think it's accurate because they count hot linking as traffic I suggest using only StatCounter.com or HisStats.com