09.24
Google Anaytics as a website stats tool is of course very good, but don’t take the totals as absolute truth. Analytics can’t count, it misses quite a large amount of traffic because it is relies on JavaScript to run on every page load. There are numerious places where this can fail and hits are lost.
For example if your Anaytics code is at the end of the page and another JavaScript code fails it can stop Anaytics from loading. If a browser has disabled JavaScript, which is not as likley these days, but JavaScript is a client side code and is run within the browser of the viewing computer, and there are some dodgy computers out there!
Logfile statistics on the other hand read from the log files generated by the website engine, in this case IIS and include every hit on the website. These stats programs such as SmarterStats read the log files and process them into similar reports to Analytics.
As an example, my motorsport site nmd.com.au had the following stats for August;
Visits
Google Analytics: 4,765
SmarterStats: 26,965
Google Analytics only recorded 17.6% of the visits.
Page Views
Google Analytics: 9,116
SmartStats: 69, 710
Again Google Analytics only recorded 13% of the page views.
Google Analytics is still a great tool and should certainly be used to look for trends and percentages, but refer to logfiles when you look at totals!
Google Analytics cannot count
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