The 24 hours delay on Analytics or what ever the delay is, is quite annoying. Granted it's an amazing tool, but that delay is killer. Statcounter for me.
I have done a lot of tests and have over 1000 sites in analytics account. I have put an iframe on some sites so that all traffic goes to another site as well as the one it’s on. Strange thing is that the main site gets 30% more hits. Makes no sense to me. Google is losing some of my traffic and compared to my statcounter results for each of my sites I get much more traffic according to statcounter. Strange! Yes some features are good, but the one I love the most that is missing from google is I want to click on the keyword results page that the traffic came from like you can in statcounter. It’s such a pain to workout where you are in google serps for the keywords that are showing up in analytics. Why do I have to click on the language to find out what google site it cam from and then manually open a window and type the keywords in. Am I doing something wrong people? And the 24 hour thing is a pain in the ass sometimes on the sites where I get large amounts of traffic.
I got fed up with waiting for Google Analytics to refresh stats. I have been using Clicky recently, and love it. It has a "spy" feature that allows you to watch the the visitors hit your site in real time.
Another vote for google analytic is great, the delay in update of data worth the quality of service they provide.
I have turned all my hosting clients to G Analytics, they were all using webalizer or analog in cPanel and it was hosing my servers. Thank God for analytics. Plus it's much better than any other stats package I've ever seen and *only* Google has the server horespower to handle the urchin tracking.
Erm.. I watch my analytics all day.. I don't use adwords in it and if you start looking at 1am your time you will start seeing stats. I would call it a 1-3 hour lag at most.
It seems to be 3x a day for me. At work, I check it all day. For my personal sites - once a day...so time doesnt matter much to me.
So...sooooooooo true! 1 day of delay man...it's huge. I admit that by far is the best tracking sys out there but I can't accept this delay...
There are many variables to consider in your stats. For one thing unless you manually lock yourself out of awstats you will be counting your own hits. If your site is large and very busy that won't matter but if it's moderate to small it can. Now, (waits for the bashing from this statement) Anyone that honestly knows statistics will tell you that Google Analytics is nowhere near accurate, and will never be as accurate as a real log parser. There are many ways google will miss data, and if your site is really big that number can be substantial. For instance, I did some serious tweaking (aw stats is free FYI) and I really tuned up AWstats. I ran a month on a very busy script site i have. Right now (during this test) i averaged 1.2 million page views per day. I monitored the site with both AWstats and Google. The busier the day the further google was from accurate. sometimes as much as 20% difference. There is no substitute for log parsing. Period. Now, all that being said, Google still has a great niche here and that's the conversion tracking. Although, someone knowledgeable with AWstats can track anything analytics can. Google is a great tool for watching trends. But it will not give you anywhere near accuracy on numbers. Knowing that going in, a combination of statistical programs is optimal.
Make sure you send yourself weekly stats of your dashboard via .pdf w/ comparisons. I LOVE seeing those statistics every monday! I have them sent out to all the staff too!!
I love analytics and it's a grate free service from Google but they should be working on the updates delay and become real time updates.