Google Analytics vs Webalizer

Stupid_Private

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone could tell me if they know which is more accurate?

I ask because I had a look at my webalizer stats for the first time in ages for one of my sites yesterday and noticed that it was saying I was getting at least double the visits that google analytics was saying. I mentioned this to a friend and she sent me on the report for one of her sites for June 2009
Google Analytics
1,335 visits (not unique)
6,142 pageviews

Webalizer
7,893 visits (not unique)
34,772 total pages

I've looked through the webalizer stats and the closest figure to 1,335 is their figure for "Total Unique Sites" which is still over 3,000.

A site that I'm currently trying to market gets about 8,000 visits according to google and this is the figure I've been quoting. I don't run webalizer on this site but judging by the figures above it would say I'm getting a lot more visits to the site.

MC_G

Basically, Google Analytics would be more accurate for actual human visitors to your site.

GA may under report, due to its use of javascript, but for all intents and purposes the large majority of human visitors do not have javascript disabled.

Webalizer statistics depending on which category you're are looking at can include bot, spider, and other non human hits to the web server as well as all hits to admin pages in a blog/cms, control panel log ins, etc.

I would certainly defer to someone else more experienced, but that's my basic understanding of it.

blue4ever

You probably are getting ‘a lot more visits’ to your site – but those visitors don’t have pockets or beating hearts!

Two things that site owners using webalizer (and others) do: firstly they don’t switch off visits from their ‘own site referrers’ ie you going to your site is recorded as a visit.

Secondly, and possibly accounts for you friends differences between the two applications - they don’t strip out visits from bots and spiders for their statistics. I don’t think this can be done retrospectively, I don’t think webalizer has a built in filter.

I would say that the difference between the two unique pages views can be attributed to actual human visits vs non human. Google ignores spiders and co - thus the lower figure.

I don’t think that using the webalizer stats, so as to ‘boost’ the visits numbers, is a great idea.

If you have the actual sever logs they can help a lot. Feed them into excel – for pin point accuracy and a migraine! Or I look at logs using a free programme I got from here http://www.deep-software.com. In the free version some bits are blocked, but it will data mine a little deeper than analytics – but not a visually pleasing.

C

Stupid_Private

Thanks for the info. That might explain why two rather small websites quoted me surprisingly large hits for their sites in the past few weeks.

I'll stick with the non inflated google stats. By the way, is there a way in Google Analytics to get it to ignore my visits?
Cheers

blue4ever

You can filter our a specific IP address(s) if that's any good to you. Handy bit on it here:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/06/back-to-basics-filtering-out-your-own.html

As to you own comment about the small website - it shows that there has to be some conformity applied to visits/hits/uniques etc etc. Otherwise there will never be a level plating field.