I have been following both Google analytics and my host (hostmonster) provided Awstats for the number of unique visitors. There has been a big difference between them. When my host provided 80K plus unique visitors per month, google analytics was showing less than 30K unique visitors. Though I trust the host number as the real number (they are the ones who even notify when and how long google visits my site) I fail to understand why this difference happens. I have the google analytics code included in the footer file. Have any of you observed this difference? Thanks
Neither analytic mediums is 100% accurate because each is measuring different things. For example, Awstats works from the actual server logs and does its best to extract information from that. google is only tracking those of your visitors with JavaScript enabled and so will miss out on around 6-10% of your visitors completely. In any case trying to estimate such things as unique visitors when all you have to go on is the IP address (where the same address can be used by many different people and the same person can have different IPs at different times) will give different results depending on exactly how it determines whether multiple page loads are likely to be the same person or not.
the hostmonester is more accurate that google analytic that its read from you server and see every hits that you got it.
Anyway I would like to choose GA! Because we mainly aim to do SEO work for Google! Google is the most commonly used search engine over the world!