how to get accurate traffic stats ?

  • HI !

    I am using a few tools to help me to check traffic stats : I opened an account with google analytics, I use slimstats plugin, and I have awstats installed automatically via my webhoster.

    All 3 seem to show different stats. google shows almost no traffic beside bots and spiders. slimstats shows low traffic (there are some IPs with no spider symbol, I assume it’s real human traffic), and awstats shows very different stats (hundreds of unique visitors. I browse my website from 2 or 3 different devices only).
    awstats distinguishies viewed and non viewed traffic, so you can clearly see which is genuine traffic.

    Any idea why all these tools seem to show so different stats ? Which are reliable ?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • I’d believe the figures from Google Analytics mostly – but none of them will ever be 100% accurate.

    The biggest reason for thinking that Google’s results are about the most acruate is because it uses their JavaScript code to track visitors. Note that that’s also why it’s not 100% accurate. Some users browse without JavaScript enabled (although really not many these days) and some do block calls to analytics programs like Google.

    After that the server-based stats programs are not to bad but these do get highly inflated numbers because they consider a hit to be any HTTP request. As an example, if your page has one HTML file, 4 JavaScript files, 2 CSS files and 10 images, that’s recorded as 17 individual hits – for someone viewing one page.

    SlimStat has a server-side tracking engine, that is not affected if people have Javascript disabled, unlike Google Analytics. SlimStat should actually be very close to AWStats, unless you’re filtering some hits in the options.

    However, Catacaustic’s point about AWStats considering all the ‘hits’ and not just pageviews like SlimStat does, could be the reason why its numbers are highly inflated ?? Which confirms my theory that SlimStat is indeed the most accurate of the bunch.

    Thread Starter Annyeong56

    (@annyeong56)

    thanks guys !
    yeah in any case, I don’t believe much numbers awstats give. They look oversized. I’ll probably forget about awstats tool.
    How to explain that there are some IP @ that appear with slim stats, and that look genuine, and these don’t appear with G.A ?
    It might be due to JS filters on the client side or something like catacaustic says.
    I quite like refering to slim stats numbers since they appear straight in the WP admin interface ?? makes life easier

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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