Google Analytics - dodgy stats

The awstats in my CPANEL shows I have lots more traffic than google analytics. Which do I beleive??


Also I have implemented a banner impression counter on my site and the impressions. When checked against adsense the impressions counted for adsense are no where near as many as my other banners have between them. (there is an adsense box on every page where there is banner rotation)

Thanks god google isn't a cpm based ad scheme thats all I can say.

 

Your counters may be counting bots and agents, while Google Analytics only counts "humans". Have you tried contacting Google support?

 

I'm having the same problem... I just don't know what is causing it.

 

forget awstats. Its a server based analytics.
Browser based analytics like google analytics are more accurate compared to server based ones.

 

Are you sure? I have always thought awstats is better because it's server based...

I think Google analytics tracks only users with JavaScript turned on, so that might be one reason, why the stats are so different.

 

Google Analytics does not count robots and spiders, awstats do!

 

Awstats can have other issues, if your using ajax, thats counted as another page load when its not. Unidentified spiders will rack up page impressions too.

Analytics has disadvantages such as mobile phones dont run javascript properly, but seriously your not going to rack up that much pages unless you are actually all about mobile sites...

As for desktops, its impossible to use the internet without javascript (ajax websites would be a disaster) so really it should be very little who dont have javascript.

Pierce

 

GA is more accurate.
You can go ahead and experiment with it.
It will take some time though to find out on your own.
I believe GA would be able to give you the detail statistics of what kind of user has been visited to your site. There are other tools too, which gives you the interpretations of server logs. But I don't really liked them at all.
If anybody has used some other useful tools, I would like to give a try.
Thanks.

 

I don't think GA is more accurate - I mean, which more do you believe? Together AWStats and Webalizer (both showing same stats) showing stats based on SST (server side technology), or the JavaScript-based Google Analytics based on CST ?

 

Well said. awstats or webalizer in CPanel will show scrapers, bots, and other junk as valid hits. Google Analytics is also muc more observant of unique visits.

 

What made you think that? Would love to know.

 

doesn't your analytics and adsense impression stats show about the same numb ers?

and a lot of organizations turn javascript off. the two colleges I attended in the last 4 years both turned javascript off and the internet browsing experience is just fine....that is almost 20,000 web users in new york alone...

 

Awstats counts quite close to what analytics does.. so there must be some other problem like "code not on every page" or something like that.

 

Yeah, that could be one of the possible reason.
Most people put it on homepage only.

 

It's always a good idea to have multiple ways to track your hits. <plug>Try out GoStats - a realtime stats alternative</plug>

 

why pay when analytics is totaly free?

People often forget that analytics is urchin stats. For thoes looking at pricing of urchin before google bought them out it was $5,000 per domain. I dont think any other stats service is going to compare.

Pierce

 

ive used tons of analytics software like HBX and webtrends, and Goog analytics is dead on in stats!

 

GoStats is free too. ...but thanks for having an open mind

 

The difference is that awstats is a server based tool and google analytics is a browser based tool.

And as a result stats also varies for the same site.


Here's some basic differences:

Browser Based Tool (Google Analytics)

Advantages

-Produce accurate user data with less effort than log files.
-Conversion Tracking

Limitations

-Implementation Effort

-JavaScript Disabled on Browser In the event that a user has JavaScript turned off on their browsers (currently estimated to be 2-3%), the potential exists to overlook the traffic from that segment of the population.


Server Based - Advantages (AWStats)

-Search Engine Spider Reporting
-Server Error Code Reporting

Disadvantages

- Proxies Servers
Proxy servers used by most major companies and major ISPs can create barriers for collecting data. For companies that rely on server-based measurements, proxy servers may prevent complete data from reaching the web server to be logged. For instance, if 3,000 people in a proxy group viewed a web page, the web server would only log it as one request because the proxy server requests the web page only once, and then distributes the web page to the 3,000 users in the proxy group.

- Similar issues may be caused by the use of browser navigation. When a visitor hits the "Back" or "Forward" button on their web browser, the web browser will use a locally cached copy of the web page that it saved from the last time the web page was visited.

- No Conversion Tracking

 

My sentiments exactly. I run my own dedicated servers and to not have stats run for the 100+ domains on my server Google Analytics is a fantastic service. The more processes I can keep from running on my machines means my servers have more process left to handle the httpd and mysql requests. Plus, Analytics totally jams. The data representaion is brilliant.

This topic has come up on my forum several times and we figured out Analytics is smart enought not to count "bot" hits. When a "bot" or "spider" hits your page it has a different USER_AGENT in the request headers. Analytics trims off the hits that are not browser requests.

Additionally, Analytics requires a page fully load before logging a transaction because the Urchin code is the last thing before the </body></html> so partial requests aren't counted either. In a traditional stats package like AwStats, the hit is logged at connection, not a full page load. For my needs, I want only true, valid hits reported to me not bogus hits because real hits are hits that convert.

Any webmaster tracking conversions knows Analytics is the truest representation of data available.