How come unique visitors data on Google Analytics and Awstats are different?
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I've asked this question myself, and the only conclusion I've come to is this:
Google Analytics monitors traffic via Google itself. AWstats monitors ALL traffic to your website.
You have to remember that AWstats is a server-side application (and a brilliant one at that, I might add.) and hence monitors all traffic to the domain it's installed on.
Google, on the other hand, only monitors traffic via itself, and thus will never give you the same statistics as AWstats for a spesific domain.
When in doubt, I go with AWstats.
What does AWstats offer?
AWstats devides up your traffic like this:
WHEN: Montly History - traffic by month Days of month - daily traffic Days of week - traffic according to the days of the last week Hours - Your traffic during the last 24 hours
WHO: Countries - your visitors by country Hosts - Which hosts your visitors connect to your site from Authenticated Users - self explanitory Robots/Spiders - which visitors were search engine crawlers
Navigation: Visits duration Files type Viewed Operating Systems Browsers
Referers: Origin - Refering search engines - Refering sites Search - Search Keyphrases - Search Keywords
This is just the outline of what you get from AWstats. The reality is that you get a massive amount of information about your visitors - much more than what you get from Google Analytics. The data is also unbiased, as it depics ALL your visitors, not only ones from a spesific source.
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I know man. I have a new website, http://www.webtalk.co.za and the analytics reports and awstats NEVER agree on what happened.
At least now you know the reason.
PS: You should go to www.xml-sitemaps.com and make your site a sitemap. You have to submit your sitemap to the search engines each time you make changes to get your site re-indexed. I wrote a script just for that purpose. Contact me.
This drives me crazy. Google Analytics shows about 6k unique visitors and awstats about 1k for the same period. Any hints?
THIS COMMENT SHOULD ALSO BE SEEN AS AN UPDATE TO MY ORIGINAL POST:
Well - it works like this:
There are two different ways of collecting web analytic data: Logfile analysis (which awStats use) reads all the data in the server's log file, while Page Tagging (Google's method) uses Javascript on each page to notify them when a page is rendered by a browser.
The difference is thus due to 2 reasons:
1: file caching - if a returning visitor has file caching enabled on his browser ( which is the norm) the request for the file (which he viewed on a previous date) will not be sent to the server, hence no Logfile activity, and no loggin in awStats.
2: Page Tagging relies on the client browser (visitor's) to provide the analytical information requested. In some browsers, that is disabled for security reasons.
More than one factor thus comes into play when it comes to analytics, especially on how it is collected.
Feel free to comment or ask questions.
@Fixxer: Thanks for your answer.
Do you really think the two reasons mentioned could explain the huge difference of 1000 unique visitors with awstats and 6000 unique visitors with Google Analytics.
Besides Google Analytics, what analysis tools would you recommend?
@Manuel
I tend to rely on awStats. I use that as the measure for my visits. Considering all the options and their pro's and con's I think it's better to pick one and use that as your main tool, otherwise it just gets too confusing.
I have like 10 times the unique visitors compared to what's reported in analytics. Is it because they javascript must be fully loaded to be considered a complete visit whereas awstats counts a visitor even if he just clicked on the link and then closes it before the page is even loading? I just drives me nuts!
I recently learned that webalizer data is more authentic than awstat. Is it true?
Google Analytics is better, because it only track real visitor traffic. Awstat tract all traffic including when you are working in the admin page. So it can be misleading.
meech741 2 years ago
Thanks, that question was driving me crazy. I have a website where my awstats are going up, and my analytics are going down.