Google Analytics versus my Host's Urchin Data?

[Florida-Photo]

Google Analaytics does not "re-count" visitors who return to the site in the same 30 minute window. It also does not count visits from spiders and web crawlers. So in my opinion, it is a much better measure of "unique visits" (of the human kind) than server logs. So while the numbers may appear much lower in GA than in your server logs, they are much more useful from an SEO and usability standpoint.

However, if you are looking to track things like downloads of a particular file or image, then server logs are a must.

[IanG]

Even filtering out the Spiders & Web crawlers shows that Google Analytics grossly under reports visitors to a site.

It doesn't give an accurate reflection of unique visitors at all because of the way it works and many visitors coming via search engines go straight into a site bypassing the home page.

If you want accurate information that can only be obtained from analysis of the server logs.

Ian

[Florida-Photo]

IanG - You bring up a good point. You have to install the GA tracking code on every page of your site, not just the home page, in order to get accurate numbers for each page.

[IanG]

IanG - You bring up a good point. You have to install the GA tracking code on every page of your site, not just the home page, in order to get accurate numbers for each page.

By the time you've done that you've expended far more time and energy than is required to do the job properly by just analysing your sites statistics, which will give you much more information anyway and be 100% accurate.

I should add that analysis of server logs give you the information on unique visitors and whether they revisit your website, good software also filters out the visits by search engine robots etc, and gives you far better information about what search strings etc are used when people find your site via search engines.

Ian

[percepts]

Fact: It is impossible to get accurate statistics. At best you can expect around 70% accuracy and you should only use them as a guide.

There are hundreds if not thousands of robots, crawlers and spiders which don't identify themselves by including bot or crawl or spider in their user agent. That means they are assumed to be normal visitors unless someone has visually checked the raw log files to look at the access patterns and identified them as a bot and set their IP number in a bot list. But they change their IP numbers so even that isn't reliable and requires constant human monitoring to keep IP lists upto date.
Then AOL and others use proxy servers which gives different users the same IP number and if two users are accessing your site at the same time there is no way to identify that there is one or more users at that time.
Then if people have your site in the browser cache it doesn't goto the web to get the page again. And on and on. All web stats are inaccurate.
The best you can do is to look at unique IP numbers who have visited and then entry pages and then search phrases and how often each search phrase was used.

Awstats does all this but has one fundamental flaw in that it counts search phrase use multiple times for a single visit if its in the raw log file multiple times so even that is misleading.

Google bought out Urchin and analytics is based on Urchin. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that Google are far more likely to keep an IP list of bots upto date than any ISP or web host because they are in the business of collecting and selling marketing data. And they want information to be accurate as feasible. So whilst they may report less visits it may well be because they are closer to true user visits. You and I just don't know the facts so lets not make wild assumptions about them being inaccurate just because they are smaller numbers. Fact is web hosts couldn't give a stuff if the numbers are correct. They are only interested in server performance and bandwidth usage.

[percepts]

slightly OT but with the advent of ajax it occurs to me that no search engine is going index page content which is fetched via javascript http requests since most of them do not process javascript. So google analytics will probably not count those ajax file requests but it can count IP numbers which visit your site even if some them are bad bot which don't identify themselves.
The moral of the story being that if you want all of your site visible to search engines, don't use ajax scripts in them and your site will get fuller indexing and better stats reports.
But they still will won't be very accurate.
Also learn to interpret the data. For example, if the sum of all search phrase accesses plus the number of other referring sites is close to the number of unique IP's or Visits, then your stats are probably quite accurate. If they are wildly different, then you likely have a lot of bad bots, which don't identify themselves, visiting your site. But it could be AOL which sometimes uses dozens of IP numbers for a single user visit.

[canvasjunkies]

Most of the above does not matter much in my opinion. I found Google Analytics under counts a bit, but if you use it for a long period of time, it gives you a good measurement over time. Basically, you can see the trends of increase/decrease traffic from month to month or week to week or whatever period you need to analyze. If your visits drops 20% then you need to see what is going on? What are you doing differently? What pages were visited before that are not being visited now? You are really looking for trends and page visits or even goal completions. For that, Google does an excellent job for the right price, $0.00. If you use Analytics in combination with a good web cart, your page count will be as good as it gets.

[mickeyy]

Personal Hosting stats works off of server logs while Google Analytics is third-party JavaScript (and only counts visitors that have JavaScript enabled by their web browsers). While nearly all web browsers have JavaScript capability, the difference between those who don't and those who do are search engine spiders and other bots which crawl your site.

[John Whitley]

By the time you've done that you've expended far more time and energy than is required to do the job properly by just analysing your sites statistics, which will give you much more information anyway and be 100% accurate.

This is only hard if you're hand-authoring every page of your site, in which case you've already "expended far more time and energy than is required to do the job properly."

This is why it's vital to have a site setup that allows for layout templating. That is, all the stuff that looks the same on each page (headers, footers, site-wide navigation, etc) is managed in one place. Adding a site-wide (or even a section-wide) change as discussed here is trivial in a properly managed site.

[Milosz Wozaczynski]

I'm using this tool to analyze my stats:
http://www.weblogexpert.com/

It's important, that it shows good refferers stats, which is not good in google analytics.
There are two versions. Free and paid. Paid is a bit better, but free works fine.