What Web Stats Should You Trust?
What website stats package should you trust?
As any website owner will know keeping an eye on your site’s visitor numbers is an essential part of running a successful online business.
But we’re often asked which web stats package should be trusted over another.
Most web hosting companies give website owners access to a vast array of statistcal information, from how many visitors have been to a website to where they came from and what they looked at, to how long they spent on the site. This information is extremely useful to see how well a certain page is performing, where a visitor came from and what the visitor looked at when they were on a particular website, and can aid in the search engine optimisation process.
There are 2 commonly used web stats packages (there are a lot more but these are the most popular): AwStats (a server side statistical program) that uses logfile analysis to read the logfiles in server records and Google Analytics which uses page tagging via a Javascript code placed on every page of a website. Both have their advantages and disadvantages though when it comes to recording visits.
AwStats records server activity and then presents it in a logical manner with graphs and a lot of numbers! ALL server activity is recorded, including those from ‘bots’ that have crawled a website reading the contents. Most of these will be sent from search engines and are indicated as such in the AwStats package. These ‘bots’ can be subtracted from a website’s total visitors to calculate a more accurate figure of website visitors.
Google Analytics on the other hand, is a java script powered 3rd party application which will only record visits from browsers where java is enabled. Many people disable java in their preferred browser and some anti-virus software also disables java in a machine’s browser to protect against malicious software being installed onto a PC. If java has been disabled in a web browser then Google cannot record the visit as it is effectively invisible to them. On the upside, Google Analytics provides far more detail on the visits it does record so shouldn’t be discounted!
Because both sytems record visits in different ways there can sometimes be a big difference in the number of visitors each one records. If you’re just interested in visitor numbers and don’t need or want all the bells and whistles, then AwStats is a safer method of measuring a website’s overall visitor numbers.
In short, there’s no right way or wrong way to record a website’s visitors, but by using both together a website owner can gather the information needed to help increase their website’s traffic and make improvements if and when necessary.
