I'm just curious as to all of your thoughts on statistic gathering on your sites. I've always used google analytics and if traffic doesnt appear on my analytics account, i dont consider it "real" traffic. There are alot of traffic providers who claim they are sending you real traffic but it only appears on certain monitoring systems, like statcounter or whatever. My thoughts have always been that if it truly is legit human trafic, it should appear on any or all tracking thats available. I've been doing alot of research and reading and am finding alot of traffic resellers claiming they sent "x" amount of hits even though analytics doesnt report it. In fact i'm dealing with that issue with an email marketer i'm working with right now. statcounter says i've gotten thousands of hits, but when i go to my analytics it only shows 20 or 30. Big discrepancy... have any of you worked with traffic providers that you would say are actually "legit" and can actually walk the walk? thoughts?
You should have a traffic monitoring system with your host company - who has nothing to gain from inflating your numbers. For example, I use Blue Host, so I can check my Awstats every day. Sometimes, my Awstats numbers are a little higher than Google Analytics, but Google doesn't take into account traffic coming from Yahoo, Bing, etc and Awstats does.
Really? Wow i was NOT aware of that. I thought analytics just monitored all traffic and was unbiased in that regard. My host is with godaddy, but thats very surprising to hear about google analytics...
Thats not true because on Google Analytics you can see traffic from search engines including Yahoo and Bing, and even Ask.com and Search.com it gets all the traffic. I think the reason that Analytics uses java script so if the visitor has java script disabled it won't count as a visit. Where as Statcounter counts every visitor.