statistics discrepancy

miju

guys quick question for you all. I'm trying to pick the best stats package (with accuracy being the most important) for one of my websites:

Anyways have been running each of them for the month of Feb and the statistics on each of them are completely different from the other. For example:

Awstats: 10432 visits
Webalizer: 10186 visits
ModLogan: 10060 visits

What tends to be the most accurate of stats packages in your experience?

Sparks

Google Analytics is pretty decent; grepping the apache log (which is what awstats and webalizer do) isn't always going to be as accurate, but you should probably keep in mind that no web statistics package will be properly accurate.

You're probably better off only keeping a periheperal eye on hits/views/visitors/etc and instead focus on conversions, whatever they happen to be for your site.

daymobrew

Sparks wrote: »

Google Analytics is pretty decent; grepping the apache log (which is what awstats and webalizer do) isn't always going to be as accurate, but you should probably keep in mind that no web statistics package will be properly accurate.

I would have thought that grepping the Apache log would be the most accurate.
If Javascript is turned off then Google Analytics won't collect much/any data, but the apache log will.

Sparks

If you want to know how often a file's pulled, then yes; if you want to know how many people came to your site then not so much. GA is doing a lot of fairly smart guesstimation in its reports to get visitor numbers and the like. Hits or views, GA won't be as accurate as the logfiles for, but when you start to try to figure out more details than that (like visitors for example), then I'd lean more towards GA than awstats. Doesn't mean you can't run both.

Mind you, as Conor could tell you, website statistics is more art than science...

miju

cheers for the replies guys and clarifying my hunch, much appreciated