I have been using Google Analytics, but don't like it much, for it has been misleading for me. It always counts my own IP as a visitor(I couldn't see a way to exclude it.), so a page that I was working on and therefore continuously reloading, looks like the most popular page on my site. But it isn't. I also don't believe the number of unique visitors is true. It also shows most of my traffic as referrals, which are actually organic traffic from Google. In the deatils, GA says only "/imgres" as the traffic source. I can't see who came to my site with which keyword and so on. I think I'll give statcounter a try.
I recently discovered statcounter and I can say that it is easy to use and understand compare with google.
I'm still working hard to find out whereabouts to get the full fledged reports with analytics. Statcounter seems to be simple.
they are both great, but in terms of deep tracking of a visitors, like where your leads came from and etc. Google analytics is still the best, but one feature that i like from statcounter, is you can see the ip addresses of each visitors...oohh scary..
I use StatCounter free to keep a general overview as I start / build my sites, but then as I need to get into heaver metrics and actual analytics, I move the site to Google's platform.
They have the most money behind everything - stat counter was probably developed by someone, and not a company
conclusion: still think awstats displays more details. will stick with that. but will choose analytics any day
extremely sorry for the multiple posts. my digital point is messing up and will only let me do 1-line posts.