Thread: Does this make sense? awstats vs analytics

I am wondering if my adsense or analytics code is inserted in my blog incorrectly.

When I check my awstats, it shows between 200-300 visits a day. When I check my analytics acct, it shows 5-7 page impressions?

Maybe I just do not understand the difference between the two?

I used the Flexx pro theme and it has an option to insert the analytics code for you.

Anyone have any ideas for me?

I set up a hit counter on one of my websites at the same time that I installed anyltics and the hit counter shows over 1000 hits but anlytics shows 61

Your awstats is going to show every hit to your page no matter what. It divides them into categories, but isn't always going to be 100% accurate about that. Many of the visitors could still be spiders that just aren't showing themselves as such. There are other similar type factors as well. There are many ways for stray useless traffic to hit your site, awstats willl show it all. From the control panel go look at the most recent visitors and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Analytics is going to give stats based on you're page actually being displayed to a visitor. The bounce rate is possibly the biggest factor after the spider issue I just described. When a visitor lands on your page it is sent to the browser. The analytics code is the last code on the page, if a visitor bounces before the analytics code is reached it won't show in the stats. All the data in analytics is for visitors that stayed long enough for the page to load the analytics code. The bounce rate shown is for the people that stayed long enough for the code to load.

Again, there are other factors that affect this as well, but that should give you an idea.

The awstats is great to see actual stats of how many people are finding your page. It is taken from your server logs so is the most accurate measurement about whether people have been sent to your site. The logs are the only method you can use to verify any kind of purchased traffic.

Analytics is more useful for seeing your actual results though.

Keep in mind that analytics uses javascript for their tracking and if the "visitor" does not have javascript enabled it won't be tracked. As for awstats it shows way more visitors than my non-javascript php tracker which all it does is add +1 more row to a db table when someone visits the site. Sometimes the difference is close to 30%. Btw I haven't used analytics in quite some time, but last I remember it didn't track spiders, so that will surely impact the stats.

as the above poster said.
AWStat record raw hits (every hit that land on your site) with or without javascript enabled, it shows the accurate traffics and their sources. In contrary, GAnalytic usually can't track any hit or traffic if the user has disabled javascript on his/her browser. As a result, GAnalytic will show less visitors than the actual visitors..

I've found that AWSTAT isn't really any good for monitoring your traffic, mainly because it counts all hits/raw hits, meaning it's really not very useful for you to monitor your websites progress, I personally like Google Analystics, but I've had differ results with Piwik and GA, not too sure why as both use JS tracking, Piwik is self-hosted/live updating, but doesn't have as many features as GA.