Hi there, For years now, webalizer and urchin (before google bought it out) always were/are higher in visitors than awstats. For the past two months, for my site, awstats had 570 visitors avg for the month and then 870 visitors avg for the month. Webalizer was 750 and 1100 for the months. Thats quite a difference. I like awstats better so I look at that for my own personal view, but of course when linking other people for link exchanges or the such, I act as if I only have webalizer as it helps out a lot . I'll try out google analytics when I can, but I'll have to wait for it. What are other peopls experiences?
I have noticed quite a few differences and this has tended to be when a robots file is out of date and it registers new IP's as visitors rather then robots. Analytics is great! I have it running on a few domains that I run and it shows some good detail. I do like AWStats because of it's simplicity also.
Yeah, I'm just wondering which I can trust, I don't want to think I have this many visitors if alot are really bots and such. So from your experience, are the visitors that awstats gives accurate enough? Overall, again, I just want to have the right thoughts of my visitors.
Hi, Many stats programs use old lists of robots. The list of robots of AWStats is updated regulary. It is not perfect, there are new robots every day and no system can detect all new ones, but it is very good. When speaking about visits, AWStats times-out after approximately 60 minutes. Many other stats programs time-out after 30 minutes. Say if someone visits several pages of your site between 9:00 and 9:10 and between 9:45 and 9:50, this will be 1 visit for AWStats and 2 visits for some other programs. This means that AWStats results will generally count less visits than the other programs. Jean-Luc
Okay thanks Jean-Luc. So I guess what I've been doing so far is good. I look toward awstats for what I think my real traffic is, but use my higher webalizer stats when link exchanging, advertising, etc.