Reliable stats?

[D Haynes]

I have a very basic site I'm working on and I noticed some wild differences in the traffic reports from the host provider and Google analytics. Hostgator is telling me I'm getting between 400 and 500 unique visitors a day and Google is telling me I'm getting about 20 a day. I know that Hostgators stats will include bots etc but they do detail how many of these are part of the final number. I also read somewhere that Google doesn't report all visits, including people not using a java script. So I was just hoping the more experienced of you could tell me who or what I should be trusting in these reports or if there are better tools available etc. Thanks in advance.

 

[enlytend]

Now i just read over everyone's input and one thought that came to mind is, wouldn't the best way judge how your site is doing by simply looking at the interaction?

• What I mean is how many Facebook shares are your post getting?
• How many shares by Twitter or any other social venue available?
• How many comments?

I believe these are the true measurements of people coming to the blog. As far as the number of unique hits and visitors even though the number you see might not be 100 percent reliable it should give you an idea.

Conversions are very valid to measure, but we were talking about measuring traffic - conversions don't reliably indicate how much traffic you're getting or the nature of that traffic. A site can get a ton of traffic and convert poorly, or get a modest trickle of visitors and have a great conversion rate. And all sites don't perform equally well on social media

Having the whole picture is ideal. If you know how much traffic you're getting, what that traffic is, and how different segments of it perform for relevant metrics (could be sales, leads, newsletter sign ups, social shares, phone calls...) then you know whether the answer to getting more conversions lies in getting more traffic or in optimizing for better conversions. For example, if you see that your mobile traffic has significantly poorer performance than desktop you may want to revisit how your site looks and functions on mobile before just throwing more traffic at it.

Btw, in Google analytics (and piwik) you can tie traffic data directly to conversions by configuring "goals". Can't do that with the simple log analysis programs or statcounter - at least not the free version.

Hostgator and other Cpanel hosting have awstats, analog and webalizer, which are very basic tools which analyze your activity logs.

 

[amaz_bab]

you can filter out all this ghost spam with custom segments in google analytics.
don't be confused between filter and custom segments in analytics.
if you set a filter, the data will be filtered beginning with the day you set the filter (historic data won't be filtered).
If you create a custom segment and activate it, you can add it to your data view and it also filters historical data. you can add and remove it whenever you want.

this may helps:

click "add segment" - on the left side "Conditions" - set "Medium exactly matches referral"

AND
Source contains buttons-for-your-website

OR
Source contains semalt

OR
Source contains snip.to

OR
Source contains .....

OR
Source contains .....
....

also check out your organic traffic for ghost spam by choosing "hostname" as secondary dimension. you may find ghost spam here as well, add those to your custom segment as well by adding more filters in your custom segment:

Hostname contains iloveitaly.com
Hostname contains с.новым.годом.рф
Hostname contains.....

you're likely to find new spam again and again in your stats so you should check your referrals and hosts and update your custom segment before diving deeper into the data.