Anyway, i agree with one of the first comments, use the Google analytics and take the average.

As for why different analytics packages don’t match up — they really don’t want to. They need to differentiate in order to prove they’re better or at least a better value. All need to make certain assumptions about what should count as what, and what should not. These assumptions are part of the differentiation — still, they are assumptions. Some really do more things better than others (data correlations, display, ease of use, etc.), but no package I’ve seen or used couldn’t be augmented by features of another.

However, in the past 8 years, I’ve used almost everything from analog to omniture in helping to improve client websites. They’re all tools, they all have limitations, they all are more or less appropriate for specific websites, and all can be very useful when used properly. (Though “very useful” may be a bit generous for some…)

Script tracking is not better or more accurate than log file analysis — it’s just different; more appropriate in some situations, less so in others, sometimes it’s ideal to have both.

IMO - The bottom line is that only trends and conversions matter. Trends give you indication of what’s going on and conversions are truly the only hard facts. Hits, visits, page views, etc. can only be approximations, regardless of assumptions, because not every visit to your website happens on your webserver — that’s the Net.

As for Google Analytics — believe me, I understand the reluctance of giving your data away, especially to the people who set the prices you pay for advertising. Still, Google Analytics is on par with other packages that are worth $1000’s per month — it is far and away more powerful than any other “free” analytics tool out there, and much better than a lot of commercial ones, too. Plus, chances are, your data is not so much different from your competitors who may be benefiting tremendously from use of Google’s tool.

And finally, none of these tools will do anything for your business — at best, they can tell you what’s happening on your website, but you still will need to figure out what that actually means and what to do about it. Graphs can only give you clues and look pretty - whether you pay for them or not.

However accuracy rules speed at least for most sites.

Personally I prefer the webalizer stats because they are higher…….

Dan

Another question:

If a domain includes a port number (to whatever reason) and I can see this url in “Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines)” with about 100.000 pages and 1.000.000 hits (total numbers are 230.000 and 2.200.000) for one month… can it be that one request is counted twice?

1.) the url with the port number (which isn’t really external)
2.) the redirection without the port number

We’d already get rid of the port number… but the high risin’ stats for former month keep on confusing me.

On the other hand I have problems with awstats. With the same logfile (imported) in the same log format and the same config of awstats.conf and the same of everything it shows a far less amount of visitors and visits (~ 40% of amounts under Windows).

The other numbers (pages, hits, bandwidth) are exactly the same, which just tells me, the logfiles are recognized somehow properly.

I have to admin on Suse I use version 6.6. On Windows it had been 6.5. Can’t be such a big difference.

Is there anyone who’d experienced the SAME weird thing or has any advice / guess what I can do???

However, you seem to have missed a paradigm shift. As somebody mentioned before, it’s not about hits anymore, it’s about conversions. Hits - especially pagehits and not visits - are 20th century stuff to impress suits to get a larger budget. It’s all about humans and patterns nowadays. Have a look at Clicktracks - they even have a free software nowadays. They not only help you to streamline your page, but also do a great job in identifying vistor trends. You might even want to look at Visitorville. Rather expensive too (last time I looked at it), but it adds a fun element and does a pretty good job at showing patterns too.

I would be reluctant with Google Analytics. Call me paranoid but Google does already know enough about me and my sites. Thankfully there’s plenty of alternatives.

If you look at the summary in Awstats you should see a section at the very top where you have “Viewed traffic” ie. humans and “Not viewed traffic” which is robots etc., ie. non-humans

Webalizer doesn’t even try to differenciate between the two and just gives you a total.

For January of 2006, for example, my blog did 20.24 GB of “human” traffic while it did a further 164.31 GB of bots etc.,

Michele

I shift transfer around 7GB each month to serve around 38,000 monthly visitors. I use a combination of Six Apart and Statcounter monitoring to keep the two tracking methods honest.

I have a copy of Analog - I might try downloading the raw logs and running them through Analog for yet another view on the stats (!).

Or maybe I’ll just watch the trends, as you suggest. Actual numbers aren’t that important to me anyway and vary with which package you ask in any case!

different engines work differently. awstats, i think, removes a certain amount of robot traffic, which is why it is usually lower than other stats packages on all values.

on some instalations of webalizer i’ve been faced with, i’ve noticed that it doesnt always know what a page actually is - on one site, pages were .*htm*, meaning .php pages weren’t counting as pages at all.

personally, my pref is always to download the the log files and a copy of webtrends i have over them. there is a degree more configurabilty with that than online stats packages offer

I think this is because Webalizer doesn’t distinguish between human visitors and automated requests (bots etc.), whereas AWStats *tries* to distinguish between the two.

If you compare the two packages to Google Analytics you will have even less visits again.

Still I wouldn’t mind stats like those

On the advertising front, the only advertiser is Google and their ad service is based on the number of times their ad is clicked on. Because they are hosting the ad, they know how often it is clicked.

Donncha, Matt used to give you a hard time over stats, did he?
That may account for the differing Visits Donncha but not the Page Views which are also poles apart.

As for the visits, that could be simple. One package thinks a visit is the amount of time spent on a site in 15 minute chunks, while the other thinks it’s 30 minutes.