Terrie's personal timeline, a place to collect and share things from Terrie's life.
Created by tmac313 on Aug 8, 2009
Last updated: 10/31/10 at 02:14 PM
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http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/10/07/14-tools-to-legally-spy-on-your-competition/
http://green.yahoo.com/blog/guest_bloggers/24/all-black-penguin-discovered.html
Whether writing a blog or developing a Web site, we need to know what our numbers are. How many visitors? How many page views? How long were visitors on our site? Did they read what we wrote? We all want to know that the information and services we provide online are of value. It is also important to measure where our time and effort are paying off. We can look at the data and see what is working and what isn’t, then adjust our strategy as necessary.
Since taking over administration of a web site, I needed to know what my client’s numbers were right from the get go. What I found out was the hosting service provider stats were reporting way more views/visitors than Google Analytics—thousands more.
My research identified several potential reasons as to why Google Analytics, SmarterStats, AWStats or Webalizer report such different results. It is important to understand that they use different sources for the stats they track. Google Analytics is javascript code that is inserted into the html web code at the bottom of site pages for tracking, while SmarterStats/AWStats/Webalizer utilizes actual server logs.
Here are a few of the reasons I found for the differences in reporting:
Each bot and spider (crawler) that is sent out from a search engine for indexing is likely to show up in server logs as page views/visitors. Google Analytics does not track these.
If a user has turned off their browser’s ability to read javascript, then that user’s visit is not being tracked by Google.
With long page load times, it is possible many users are not fully loading the page before leaving the site. In this case SmarterStats counts the visit but Google doesn’t. Google is more accurate here with its reporting, since what we really care about are actual visitors.
Scout Analytics released a press release on February 17th which stated: “Scout Analytics discovered cookies have an inherent weakness that causes them to overstate the user counts on an average of two to four times.”
After a significant amount of research, I have concluded I will be using these reporting sources: AWStats, Webalizer and Google Analytics. I will be looking for trends and using these three will give me a more complete overview, especially considering the varying results. I did contact both Bluehost and CrystalTech to ask their technicians which stat reports were more accurate. Both said Google Analytics were more accurate, so these will be the baseline stats I use to report back to my client.
What has your experience been with the different reporting software, plugins or Google Analytics? What reports do you use? What information do you find most helpful in putting together your web site strategy?
http://www.444concepts.com/?p=1241#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed
http://www.deskshare.com/Resources/articles/awrc_marketingpromoting_RSSfeed.aspx
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