Google Analytics versus my Host's Urchin Data?

[Frank Petronio]

How long is your average visit? I figure anything that is under a few seconds is worthless (maybe not to count, but worthless as a reader/customer/viewer) -- do you agree?

[Ed Richards]

Even short visits are an indication that something is driving folks to your site. While you do not want all short visits, you would expect a bunch of them since searches are not very specific.

[Frank Petronio]

Yet but getting 10,000 from some Russian porn almalgamation (sp?) site is worthless to me since they don't do anything for me. I rather have 100 potential clients than 30,000 wankers like that one day.... sigh, boobs drive traffic really well.

[Ed Richards]

Ah, but if you sell ads those wankers become valuable.

[Frank Petronio]

lol I'll pass, like I don't want those "Joyful Nude" ads like some places are running. Nothing against it, just not for me.

[Ed Richards]

I doubt those Russian porn sites are looking for joyful nudes. I was thinking more about ads for custom leather and rubber clothing.:-)

[IanG]

Actually the vast majority of the visitors trying to spam my website are from US IP addresses, that's due to the freedoms allowed under the US Constitution which preventsspammers being prosecuted.

Once those are weeded out (around 80%) then quite a number of visitors spend between 5 - 20 minutes,and of those around 40% are repeat visitors (2 or 3 visits).

The most important data is the referring sites. This site & APUG show up regularly as referrals from my Profile etc, also from quite a number of sites who link to me, many that I never knew about. It's also invaluable knowing what pages people acess the site through.

This is all data Google Analytics is poor on.

Ian

[Mike Putnam]

I'm no SEO specialist but I have played around with a few analytic monitors. My experience with Google Analytics is similar to others in that it tends to consistently have the lowest values for a given day. I, like Frank, am hosted by Media Temple(I've been very happy with them) and they use urchin for analytic purposes. These urchin values are exponentially higher than google analytics numbers. I also use a download called statpress for my blog which seems to be in between Google and urchin in terms of the number of visitors, session, hits, etc. The best system I've come up with is to monitor all three over time and assess trends and not get too worked up about results on any one analytic evaluator.
Like most of you, I haven't experimented with the Russian porn method of search engine enhancement. Not a lot of qualified Russian models in Central Oregon!

Mike's Print Site
Mike's Stock Site

[QT Luong]

Another point to keep in mind is the definition of "visit" or "visitor" is quite different from one statistics package to the next.

[Frank Petronio]

I've been trying an Adify advertising account for the past 3-4 days and so far I've made $0.41 so I doubt I'll keep it up at $0.12 per day. Right now it is just morbid curiosity....