All For You

By now I would hope that everyone knows the most accurate way to get traffic stats for your site is to run them from your own server logs. Most web hosting companies provide free programs to do this or you can get one yourself like AWStats. However not all web hosting companies provide you with stats and in some cases, people just don’t realize the extreme importance of having accurate information about their traffic. Or even in some cases don’t realize that counters provided by those free counter services aren’t even remotely accurate. That in most cases, they only provide you with stats that have only about 50% accuracy.

However Google has changed all of that. They provide a free sort of invisible counter with very detailed stats and some serious degree of accuracy. But exactly how accurate are we talking here? Well that’s a very good question and I ran some tests to find out. I put the google code on two sites. The first site gets about 100 unique visitors a day, the second site gets about 1,000. I ran the tests for about 10 days and here are the results. On June 1st the server logs showed site 1 had 165 unique visitors. Google reported 140. That means that Google was about 15% off. On June 1st the server logs showed site 2 had 1257 unique visitors. Google reported 1083. That means that Google was about 14% off. After the first day I realize that being off about 15% made it worth continuing. Here is what I had for June 4-10.

Now before you get to negative, I want to point out that Google Analytics is by far the most accurate remotely hosted counter / stats type service I have ever seen in my 12 years of experience. Beyond that, they also provide some other really good and relevant stats in their daily reports including a keyword analysis report which can help you focus in on the keyword phrases most relevant to your site. So long story short, if you don’t have it already, get it.

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