Does google analytics give you more than awstats and statcounter give you?

Ive had trouble getting awstats to work, and webalizer doesnt work too well either partly because I have vhosts but I was curious that until I figure out how to get them to work to the point of actually being useful...will google analytics beat them in richness of info and analysis anyways?

I will be saving my apache logs until I get the time and patience to master some tool or the other and I know theres probably a lot of info sored in there too but I did get the google analytics key(hope it didnt expire) so was thinking of fixing it up today.

How do people compare the two? Will I be missing out on anything in particular with analytics?

 

Google Analytics gives far more information than anything else. If you can link it into your shopping carts it is amazing.

 

Well I run a couple of proxies. What I needed was some nice looking, neat and well organised data that would give me an idea of where the url and image hotlinking was coming from. Not sure if analytics can help there or not.

Also I was holding back a bit on signing up because they want an adwords account and I was hunting for one of those $50 adwords coupons. Just thought it would be a waste to sign up without grabbing some free advertising. Analytics doesnt let you sign up unless you have an adwords account . Thats adwords not adsense! I already have adsense.

 

Google analytics can help you track all those information + many more. It is far more better than any other competitor IMO.

 

Yes but its just a counter link on your page. How can it keep track of bandwidth. Isnt bandwidth something that apache logs can better track? People should be interested in how much a hotlinker leeches off them in terms of bandwidth.

 

If you have cpanel that can track bandwidth I believe. My sites are all on unlimited hosting so I don't worry about bandwidth.

 

For other people, does google analytics give them less visitors than awstats and webalizer? I love google analytics and its the only thing I look at for improving my site, but when I need to show people my traffic for sales or affiliation, I always show webalizer .

For example, past few weeks, one site has avg'ed around 1200 visitors on webalizer, around 1100 visitors on awstats, but only 800 visitors on analytics.

If you look at pageviews, all three of them are higher than what adsense says my impressions are.

 

If you are using a free hosting, bandwidth is something to think about.

 

i use both google analytics and awstats; analytics gives much more than that is provided by awstats but for a quick view i prefer awstats; analutics needs time and good speed;

like mad4 i am also having unlimited bandwidth from my host so no worries abt that;

 

Sorry for asking again, but analytics is really bugging me with how many visitors they say i get. Why does analytics give me so much less? And it seems as if they update my stats at 8 or 9 pm EST and then never finish that day...?

As in the visitor amount I have when I check for the same days stats at 8 or 9 pm EST is the same amount that google will have even after reporting the next days.

 

Analytics just allowed me to use them (xD) and they do, by far, have much more information. Of course, it only works if the person allows JavaScript.

 

analytics is great, and their goals are very good. They're giving me great information for how many people are converting on my sites. I can track who goes to the "Get quote now" kinda page, and track who of those people actually fills it out and finishes at the pages which says "thanks for sending us your information. Also the site overlay is nice, it makes it easy to see where people are on my page.

I'm a little confused by the source areas.. it says i have 30% direct connections to my site.. which is a lot since i have 98% non-returning customers and almost no offline marketing. Also it lists google as giving me lots of organic traffic.. however my ranking on there is so bad right now i doubt i could get more then 1-2 per week let alone the 80-90 per day. It seems like they are confusing their adwords referrals for organic searches.

 

If you have less traffic reported by analytics, its either because you havent added the js code to all your pages properly or you are having lots of robots or fake traffic coming in, which can not follow the javascript For real time visitors, only 1% or so will be having browser settings to block javascript.

GA is not real time, I experience a two hours delay. You may have a different delay time, but no question about reporting all traffic. You can adjust it to show stats based on your time zone.

 

I've tried Analog, Webalizer, AWStats... Google Analytics beats them all in my opinion. The level of detail I get is just unmatched by the other program.

One of my sites is a rev sharing image hosting site and I need to monitor where my traffic is coming from and what the top referrers are to make sure they're not using autosurf and the like. With the other programs I would have to spend time in shell cat'ing through the raw logs. Now with Analytics I can see traffic by content. Makes my life so much easier. And I don't have to worry about grepping through 2GB log files which brings down my server

 

Thanks. Yeah, something weird was going on with my php script and Analytics. It usually updates around 8 pm EST for me. I wish they would just update the whole day in one go, not like leave 4 hours out, with a 2 hour time delay which is usually a third of fourth of my traffic (night time).

So, basically, alemcherry, you are saying that google analytics accounts for most likely 98-99% of my real traffic? Damn, this blows, lol, I thought my traffic was so much higher. But then it is also a good thing because now my Adsense revenue is amazingly high for my traffic.

So, awstats and webalizer both include robots? They are usually 30%-40% higher than analytics. But they don't make sense because their direct traffic is at like 40 or 50% when no one ever returns to my site .

So Analytics really does rule.

 

GA only rules in the area of FREE analytics. There are of course, much better commercial analytics packages out there. These are useful if you don't want Google gettings its spying eyes on all your commercial data ;-)

 

sorry to interupt but I was wondering how to place the code on all my pages for my blogger blog or is it not needed?

 

Albeit Google Analytics has much more features than Awstats, I do use both because Awstats enables you to track visitors by IP and get traffic stats with maximum delay of 1 hour.

 

I find that Google analytics is really good and provides lots of great info but the Awstats provides a better count and different info that analytics does not, so I try to use the combination of the both