
For this Webalizer or AWstats is perfect (you’ve just found a reason to use both types of statistics program). It means you need to look at your server logs if you want to understand which robots are visiting your site and where all your bandwidth is going. This is good because you then don’t get robot visits confused with human visits. Google Analytics does not record search engine bots and other crawlers on your site.So, if a user cleans out his cookies, or if he doesn’t allow them to be dropped, Google Analytics will inaccurately record his visit. Cookies determine for example, if a visitor is a new one or a returning visitor and also allow Google Analytics to figure out how long a visitor’s visit lasts amongst other things. Google Analytics relies on cookies to work out a number of things about a visitor.If you are visited by such a person, their visits will no be tracked by Google Analytics. These people routinely block some or all JavaScript from running in their browsers. Significant numbers of people have fears of the malicious use of JavaScript by some websites.
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This can be the case if the code is placed at the bottom of the page (as we’re advised to do). Even if a site does have the Google Analytics code on all its pages, if the site loads slowly, the Google Analytics code may not have a chance to run.This would cause inaccuracies if visits to some pages were not recorded because the code just isn’t there. Consequently, some sites may not have the appropriate Google Analytics code placed on every page. This is easy to do when you use a CMS like WordPress to build sites, but not everyone does of course.
Google Analytics relies on the website owner adding special code to each page of their website. Google Analytics How Google Analytics Determines Visitor Numbers It is obvious that the data cannot possibly yield the same answers. And further, there is the possibility of time zone discrepancies. In the case of Google Analytics data collected from many thousands of your visitors, from a wide variety of locations and in the other, the information is passively collected in one location, directly from your webserver. Your Google Account will most likely be in your local time zone, and your server based reports will be based on the server’s time zone. In fact, all three may even collect daily data in different time zones so ‘days’ begin and end at different times if you host your site in a different time zone to the one you live in. This means that the point of data collection is different – for Google Analytics data is collected on the visitor’s browser (and we know how many of those there are with their infinite configuration, version, platform and addon possibilities), and for the others the data is collected on one single place – your webserver. The main difference between Google Analytics, AWStats and Webalizer is that Google Analytics gathers visitor information via some JavaScript code you have to place on each of your site’s pages, but the other two interpret the site’s server logs which are generated and held, on your webserver. Example Site 1 – Visitor Stats on 15th July 2011 Stats PackageĮxample Site 2 – Visitor Stats on 15th July 2011 Stats Package A Real Example – Google Analytics, Webalizer and AWStats Visitor Numbersįor example, on 15th July, these two sites had the following stats. On any particular day a website could have 90 visitors reported in Google Analytics, 170 visitors in AWStats and 220 visitors in Webalizer – but there are good reasons for the different figures. If you like this article, please click on one or more of the social media buttons on the left. I don’t worry too much about the discrepancies between the various programs because comparing say Google Analytics with Webalizer or AWStats doesn’t make sense as it is like comparing a speedometer with a rev counter. Web stats programs tend to have different purposes and give different results.