Posted by pkcho on February 11, 2011 at 7:40am
Can someone help me understand the differences between awstats and Google analytics?
What advantage(s) does one have over the other?
Which gives the more accurate numbers?
Thank you.
Differences between awstats and google analytics?
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Comments
External Webmaster reference sites are your best bet here
Signal,
My personal opinion is that both are great. If I had to choose one it would be Awstats, but that's only because it's written in Perl and I'm a huge Larry Wall fan. Oh and because Awstats has access to the server logs. En Masse you can be relatively certain that your log files reflect reality. At risk of starting a geek debate, though, you should look here:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/analytics/3227679.htm
And here:
http://ostatic.com/question/google-analytics-vs-awstats
Both give you a clear understanding of what you're looking at.
Truth be told, I run both, even though it's redundant for much of the information. You'll see what I mean, if you decide to go the extra mile. More information is always better in my mind.
Have a nice day,
Robbie Jackson
www.drupalcreations.com
robbiejackson@drupalcreations.com
Thank you for your thoughts.
Thank you for your thoughts. I will read through those articles.
My main reason for asking this question is that someone is boasting certain numbers using awstats and claiming that these numbers are pure users and not bots, etc... I am finding it very hard to believe this claim. I've seen the huge discrepancy between what Drupal counts as "viewed" on an article versus what Google counts as viewed, knowing that this is due to the Drupal view not filtering out bots and GA does. I'm inclined to believe that they are including all the numbers, but I do not use awstats so I can't really substantiate anything.
Of course, it is possible to angle things the way we want using any tool for our benefit. I'm trying to get past all the spin.
Thanks.
Out of curiosity, if Drupal
Out of curiosity, if Drupal shows an extremely high article view count and I determine this is mostly from bots and search engine crawlers (because GA does not show this traffic), is that a good thing?
If a particular story is receiving a lot of attention from bots, does that mean something? Is there special appeal? Or should all stories get the same attention from bots?
Thank you.
Server numbers...
Server numbers are important if your concern is the server. If your concern is the audience, you should use audience numbers. Audience numbers come from tools such as GA, Omniture and Hitwise.
Server numbers are highly misleading when applied to audience questions. I quit looking at them a decade ago. Spiders and bots, ranging from search engines to vulnerability probes to DDOS attacks, generate hits that are not pageviews. On some sites this can greatly outweigh real human traffic.
We use Google Analytics and Omniture in parallel, and of course also pay close attention to inventory reporting from our ad management system (Yahoo APT).
yelvington, thank you for
yelvington, thank you for your insight. It is very much appreciated.
I use AWStats for raw numbers
I use AWStats for raw numbers as I worry that GA gives Google too much info. Is this paranoid? It is giving google access to your web access records.
Like others have pointed out,
Like others have pointed out, there are use cases for both AWStats and Google Analytics - one is keeping in mind that since AWStats is based off your server logs, it will grab all data. However, I've generally found GA to be a little more accurate as far as the kind of users coming to your site. With that said, there are 2 other open source tools you can use:
PiWik (http://piwik.org/) - Think of it as an open source version of Google Analytics (you install it on your own server but it works in the same way GA does) if you feel unsafe about Google having a piece of your data.
Click Heatmap - I had wanted to talk about this a long time ago - its a way to see where users are click on your screen for a given page. Its very powerful in figuring out where your users may be looking for information, and what works, what doesn't and perhaps why so.
I may need to install awstats
I may need to install awstats just to compare apples to apples.
everyone, thank you for all your input!