Right now I am getting a 3-4x difference between Google Analytics and my host's own statistics. Is that not out of the ordinary? Do "page visits" and "sessions" mean different things to different stat packages?
Which do you guess is more accurate? I use Media Temple as my host, they use Urchin and they are a popular, big hosting service for a lot of corporate and designer websites so I doubt they would do anything bogus.
For one thing, Analytics will not count Google crawlers as visits.
I've never used Urchin, but Google Analytics is one of the best out there. I used to use it and then dumped it when I started hosting with Lunarpages... I need it back, badly.Originally Posted by Frank Petronio
Which way does it go? Google analytics does not count image or other file downloads/views unless you embed special code for each image - a real pain. If your other software did count them, then it should give much higher numbers for photo sites.
Ed Richards
http://www.epr-art.com
You're right , but if they download the Web page, they've downloaded the images on the Web page, and isn't the goal to see if they find and view the Web page and how long they stay? What Google doesn't do very well is track Web script driven or flash Web pages since many pages are embedded inside the main Web page, but that can be done with the host's statistics.
I use Google analytics because my host's stats aren't readily accessible. I don't look into the details, only a few keys, mostly which Web pages are being viewed recently, how long they're on the page and if they leave or go to another one.
--Scott--
Scott M. Knowles, MS-Geography
scott@wsrphoto.com
"All things merge into one, and a river flows through it."
- Norman MacLean
I suspect that the Google stats are more realistic as far as actual visitors versus page views/downloads/etc. since I have a pretty straight up site that is easy for Google to understand.
Which, umm, takes a lot of wind out of sails.... I thought I was getting a lot more traffic.
I've found Google Analytics isn't very good at all.
Try downloading the free versions of Xlogan and Deep Log Analyzer, I use the first to collect the data from my server once a week and the second to analyse it.
This combination gives very accurate data for free, and it's extremely useful for showing where your visitors come from, which word strings in Search Engines. It also shows you which serach engines are crawling your site. It also shows me that a huge number of visitors are trying to access a Guestbook I removed more than 5 years ago.
Google Analytics doesn't use the actual log files from your site and so gives very false reports, it's is a useful tool though.
Ian
Ian,
Why do you say Google gives false reports? Within the constraint that it only records pages with the google code in them, is there any evidence that it miss reports those pages?
Ed Richards
http://www.epr-art.com
Google Analytics is good as a general overview of site traffic from one day/week/month to the next.
It's NOT reliable as an absolute measure of visitors. For that, you need server logs.
Any client that does not support JavaScript, has JS turned off, or can't load the Google Analytics JS file fast enough, will not be counted by Google Analytics. When one of the sites I monitor got blogged, our server registered 70,000 pageviews, while Google showed about 7,000.
Obviously if you're charging for ads, a factor of 10 is significant.
YMMV.
Ed, even with the Google code added the Analytics is definitely under reading the actual number of visitors to those pages.
The raw data log which is generated for my site show things are very different, thta data is extremely accurate, as Ben says above the under reporting is by a factor of 10 or more, that is rather significant
Ian
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks