AWStats vs Google Analytics

[vitalir]

Hmm.. How can that be: AWStats says I got 385 unique visitors (Traffic viewed) and Google Analytics says 6 unique visitors for the same period. And AWStats does show a list of 385 unique IPs. How can that be? Unrecognized robots? What am I missing here? AWStats is the one in my hosting account.

Addition: when I tracert random IPs they lead to Germany, Austria, etc. so it is definitely not me generating the traffic.

 

[james2002]

Yes, it also does happen to me as well. I don't think there are so many bots.

 

[xXDanteXx]

Google Analytics uses javascript to determine the visitors, and if the visitors dont have javascript enabled browsers, GA does not record them.

Where as AWStats is a server side stats reporting software, so it will determine all the visitors that arrived on your site, whether they have javascript enabled or not is out question for AWstats.

In conclusion, AWStats is far more reliable than Google Analytics.

I hope that clears up the confusion.

 

[netfleet]

Google Analytics uses javascript to determine the visitors, and if the visitors dont have javascript enabled browsers, GA does not record them.

Where as AWStats is a server side stats reporting software, so it will determine all the visitors that arrived on your site, whether they have javascript enabled or not is out question for AWstats.

In conclusion, AWStats is far more reliable than Google Analytics.

I hope that clears up the confusion.

Is that right? I'd always wondered why Webalizer shows heaps more visitors than GA. I'd assumed that Webalizer was over stating (counting bots) but that's good news if it's the other way round!

You would have thought Google (being Google & analytices being such a powerful program) would have figured out a more accurate way to count.


Thanks for the info!

 

[vitalir]

I'd thought javascript is always enabled in all browsers nowdays..
One of my ideas is to point the domain to sedo for a day, but that would disappoint visitors plus may affect position in the search engine results?

 

[xXDanteXx]

Is that right? I'd always wondered why Webalizer shows heaps more visitors than GA. I'd assumed that Webalizer was over stating (counting bots) but that's good news if it's the other way round!

You would have thought Google (being Google & analytices being such a powerful program) would have figured out a more accurate way to count.


Thanks for the info!

Dont count on Webablizer the problem with it is that it doesnt distinguish between human and bot traffic and shows it to you all together. That would explain your higher number of visitors in Webalizer.

If you take a look at AWstats it shows "Traffic Viewed" and "Traffic Not Viewed". TV is actual visitors (humans) and TNV is bots (search engines and stuff)

I'd thought javascript is always enabled in all browsers nowdays..
One of my ideas is to point the domain to sedo for a day, but that would disappoint visitors plus may affect position in the search engine results?

Yes, Javascript is enabled by default in most modern browsers (FF, IE, Opera)
but there are antivirus softwares that disable it to "protect" the users, also there are some geeks out there who like to disable it.
and not to forget the phone browsers which have javascript disabled, I guess.

 

[Rob J]

The vast majority of people have javascript enabled, it would be very hard to navigate the web nowadays with javascript disabled. Although the noscript plugin for firefox is fairly popular, that lets users selectively allow javascript on sites that use it.

AWStats counts crawlers, Analytics doesn't.

 

[vitalir]

I'd thought javascript is always enabled in all browsers nowdays..
One of my ideas is to point the domain to sedo for a day,

Ok, I pointed it to sedo for a few days - sedo records exactly same number of uniques a day as AWStats => something wrong with google analytics(?).

 

[Peter]

Although most people have javascript enabled many site owners place the javascript at the bottom of the script (so that if there is delay in retrieving the javascript it does not affect page load time) so if a script does not fully load or someone navigates a away from the page before it is fully loaded then google analytics would never know however any server side stats script such as awstats will have counted it.

 

[PowerUp]

Well, since AWstats is more accurate than GA, then why do we still install GA and increase the load time by doing so? What are the benefits of having GA (other than tracking conversion)?

 

[Peter]

Processing stats on the server is resource intensive, Also google analytics give more information and in a better format.

 

[John Doe]

Ok, I pointed it to sedo for a few days - sedo records exactly same number of uniques a day as AWStats => something wrong with google analytics(?).

Nope, this rather proves that AWStats includes bot traffic. Sedo indicates always much higher visitor counts than any other parking company.

 

[Trickac14]

Thank you so much for asking this question. My awstats is showing a total of 28,000 unique views for the past 3 days and GA is only showing like 300. I had no idea what was going on, and also the impression for my adsense ads was the same as GA. Does this mean that I have tons of viewers that aren't being able to see my adsense?

If so I have so so so many people not being able to see my ads and therefore losing a lot of money. Is there ads I can put up that aren't javascript?

 

[Rob J]

Thank you so much for asking this question. My awstats is showing a total of 28,000 unique views for the past 3 days and GA is only showing like 300. I had no idea what was going on, and also the impression for my adsense ads was the same as GA. Does this mean that I have tons of viewers that aren't being able to see my adsense?

If so I have so so so many people not being able to see my ads and therefore losing a lot of money. Is there ads I can put up that aren't javascript?

Check awstats to see how much of that was crawler traffic. Maybe Google is deep crawling your site, or maybe someone is scraping your content. Also things like hotlinked images and rss feeds will show up in awstats but not analytics.

28000 vs 300 is a pretty big discrepancy, i'd guess you have some images hotlinked on some high traffic sites. This doesn't happen to be an image hosting site, does it?

 

[Trickac14]

It says I have 90 bots/spider visits total. And no this is a proxy site. I know google is way under on traffic because I threw it up on parked and it was getting a lot more traffic than GA is showing. So if I had an image on the site hotlinked somewhere how would that work out?

so far today I have 110 impressions on adsense and my awstats hasn't updated yet but I bet the traffic it says will be pretty high like around 10,000 or so, so far today.