While, like many people, I use Google Analytics, I don’t really trust it’s parsing. I do use mod_pagespeed which lets me auto-embed my GA code in every page without plugins or extra work on my part, which is great, but the results are questionable and often wildly disparate and conflicting.
Let me demonstrate:
| AWStats | Webalizer | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Page views | 2,607 | 10,354 | 8,502 |
| Hits | 49,830 | 59,542 | |
| Visits | 888 | 1,274 | 2,255 |
First of all, I can’t find ‘hits’ anywhere on Google. Their layout is different and changes regularly. Secondly, and I’m sure this jumps out at you, according to AWStats and Webalizer, I’m getting 4 to 5 times the pageviews compared to Google. I previously configured AWStats and Webalizer to exclude wp-admin and other ‘back end’ pages by editing the configuration files. I did the same in my .htaccess for PageSpeed, so I know no one is tracking admin pages.
I already know that AWStats errs on the site of users, so if it can’t tell something is a bot, it assumes it’s a user. I also know it tends to overcount, since it bases its counts on traffic in a way that is a little generous (a 60 minute count for a visit). Not a huge deal, but enough to say that yes, the 10k pageview is probably closer to the 9 or 8 of Webalizer. Speaking of Webalizer, it uses a 30 minute count, so there it skews higher. Fine, let’s be harsh and halve them.
That gives me 4000-ish pageviews. Google gave it 2600-ish.
Interestingly, Google gives a 30 minute visit count too, but it also uses cookies and javascript, which while fairly safe, doesn’t run on everyone’s browser. As an amusing side-bar, when I switched from using a plugin or manually injecting Google Analytics into my sites and started using mod_pagespeed’s insertion, my results went up. Noticeably. In part this is attributed to the fact that my site is having higher traffic than normal, but when I compared it to WordPress Stats, it was a bigger than expected jump.(I’m not using WordPress’s Stats ala Jetpack in this experiment because it only counts WordPress pages, and the site I’m using is not just WP. However on a pure WP site, WP’s stats tend to skew higher than GA.)
Which one is right? Most people will say Google is ‘closer to the truth’ but I don’t know how much I can rely on that. Certainly it’s more true for how many actual people are visiting my site, and when I’m judging metrics for marketing, I’m a little more inclined to use Google. That said, if I’m trying to understand why my page speed is slow, or where I’m getting hammered with traffic, AWStats and Webalizer are far more accurate, since they’re counting everything.
This is not to say that I think auto-posting is great for social engagement, but I find I actual pay attention more to the social aspect of the media if I don’t have to remember to post all over the place. This is a massive shift since October 2011, when I’d stopped auto-posting for SEO reasons. Why did I change my stance? Well it because easier to autopost and keep that personal touch with Jetpack’s Publicize feature. Now I can easily insert a custom message, and I know it’s going to (mostly) use my excerpt.(For some reason Tumblr is a moron about this) That saves me effort and allows me to spend more time actually interacting!
Auto-generating my stats with little effort, and being able to easily read them without needing a degree in SEO (no they don’t exist) is also hugely important. Google Analytics is easy to read, but curiously I find it overly complicated to understand. The different pages and layouts make it surprisingly hard to find ‘What were my stats for yesterday?’ Sometimes I have a boom in traffic on one day (like the day I had a 600% increase) and I want to see what went on and why. Where was this traffic coming from? WordPress’s stats do this amazingly well, just as an example.
No one tool provides all the data I need to measure all aspects of my site, nor does anyone one tool collect all the data. Google tells me more about browser size, screen resolution, and everything it can grab about the user, where AWStats and Webalizer give me more information about traffic by showing me everything, bots and humans. Basically server tools are great for collecting server stats, and webpage tools are great for user stats. But you need both.
So in the end, I have at least four different statistic programs I check on, regularly, to try and understand my traffic and measure success.
