Most accurate stats plugin? My results of Wassup-Slimstat-Statpress

Does Wassup works on 3.2.1 ?

Hi there, as the developer of WP SlimStat, I’d like to thank you for this comparison. A few numbers, though, do not demonstrate any level of accuracy, based only on which one got the biggest ?? Were you filtering bots in WP SlimStat? What about pageviews generated by you? Were those being filtered by WP SlimStat (in other words, was the corresponding option active)? (they sure can’t be filtered in GA!)

Also, we should see what ‘pageview’ and ‘visit’ means for each of these tools. In my case, I tried to be as compliant as possible to GA’s definition of “visit” (including the 30 minutes span). Do your other tools do the same? Do they count images and other ‘assets’ as pageview?

See, in order to have an accurate comparison among these tools, all these questions should be addressed first. A standard test environment should be configured, and comparable tests run.

Last but not least, have you compared the database size of the three tools and the level of detail you can get with each of them? Would it be possible to know who visited your website with a screen resolution of 1920×1200 on Novembre 28 using Firefox 3.6? Because WP SlimStat can do that ??

Cheers,
Camu

I’m tempted to take part in this quasi-survey – I do have Google [webmaster tools] and will be using Analytics soon – but for the record I would be far happier if the stats, if they are as useful as you claim – particularly as regards mal-visit’s – were in-site. I run several sites and they have specific problems and advantages over each other, which I would suggest Google Analytics might not be able to accomodate.

I agree with WilliamJames ??

Camu

Thanks for you comment Camu. I have been using your program for months now and have been very happy with it. The only reason I installed the others was due to a recent bug in collecting data where my pageviews went crazy for no clear reason. I was happy to see how quickly you were able to fix that bug and I continue to run your stats program.

I had Slimstat set to ignore bots and my pageviews.
Wassup was set to ignore bots and spam.

I don’t know what the ‘gold’ standard might be for this but assumed Google Analytics was a reasonable tool for comparison. I just want to have reliable numbers but, as I type and think about this more, I guess comparison to my own sites prior numbers really is the best number to compare to.

For that comparison, hands-down the WP Slimstat plugin is the best of the bunch. I will watch and see if I get any more of those pageview spikes but barring that will deactivate the others in due time.

Hi Eoren,

thank you for your kind words. Please keep in mind that I’m not trying to “sell” my plugin here, you are definitely free to use the tool that satisfies you the most. On the other side, I’m always on the quest for more accurate results, so if there’s anything I can do to make my plugin better, you’re more than welcome to share your thoughts and feedback!

Cheers,
Camu

I am not sure why the other plugin’s stats are so low in your tests, but I can tell you that Wassup’s numbers are the most accurate for 3 reasons:

1. it does not depend on javascript (can be disabled by visitors),
2. it tracks and stores a record of each visit, not update running counts only, and
3. it records all posts and page requests, excluding WordPress admin pages, and including 404, feed, and “robots.txt” requests, spam, and hack attempts.

Wassup is an excellent tool for monitoring visitor activity and for accurate short-term site analysis. However, Wassup’s database can grow large quickly, depending on a site’s popularity, so most Wassup users purge Wassup data regularly using it’s built-in automatic delete option. For this reason, Wassup is best for website owners who are more interested in seeing accurate data about recent and spiking trends on their website rather then viewing long-term (outdated) information.

Just for clarification, WP SlimStat does not rely on JavaScript either (at least version 2.5.2, since I’m planning to introduce a js-only tracker as an alternative for those using wp super cache and friends). The client-side code is only used to detect browser/client features like screen resolution, plugins (java, flash, etc) and color depth. Visits are logged one by one in the database, in a compact form that still allows to narrow down your views of the data collected by setting filters. I see my plugin and Wassup as the two sides of the same coin, they complement each other: one is oriented towards historic data and fine grain analysis on who/what/where/when, the other as Helen said, more focused on recent trends.

Camu

@eoren1, going back to your test, if you want a reliable “golden standard”, you may want to use a log analyzer, like awstats, not Google Analytics. These softwares can access your webserver log files directly, thus building their analysis on the “real” data recorded by your server. Google Analytics is based on a client-side script whose behavior and accuracy depends on many variables, like William said here above ??

Camu

I’ve been using Wassup for a while but its results have been skewed since I’ve enabled caching, so I removed it. However, although I decided to brush up my Google Analytics skills, I see that it lacks the depth that Wassup was giving me so I can’t see full activity on my site and discover security attacks (I described one in Login Attempts from Russia with Love).

Are there any plugins that can do this with WP Super Cache enabled?

@zarkobiz, as I said here above, I am planning to add this functionality to WP SlimStat early next year ??

@zarkoviz. If you are not wedded to WP-Supercache, there are a couple other cache plugins that users say work well with Wassup. See Wassup FAQ. I use Quick-Cache with Wassup, myself, with no drop in stats.

Thank you both.
@helened, to me it seems that Quick-Cache has some unreasonable wp-config permission requirements. How do you deal with that?

After over a week of testing it seems that Quick-Cache is also skewing my Whassup stats – after disabling it, my Wassup stats returned close enough to my Google Analytics stats (were halved with cache running), so that cache option is out for both skewing my Wassup numbers and having too drastic permissions requirements on my wp-config (I like to keep mine at 400).

I’m a little confused with all this, being a starter at making sites. My GA shows half the unique visitors that my awstats shows (not including bots, worms, and replies with special HTTP status codes).

If my server stats (awstats) are the most accurate, then why does GA only show half of what awstats shows?

And finally, when I have WPsupercache activated which is the best plugin for more detailed resutls? The slim plugin or whassup?

I basically need to be able to see what page each visitor visited, landing and exit pages and how long they stayed on each.

What’s best?

Btw, addfreestats, used to do all this, though it messed up the trackers, in that instead of showing me the page url, it showed the page title and if this is in Greek, you can imagine, all I get is some gibberish instead of the actual title. I could overcome this by hovering over the title seeing the actual url, but it wasn’t trustworthy. Now with the new version of WP (3.4.2), it doesn’t give me any info on what pages are visited (all I get is “detect page”) so its completely messed up and on its way out the window. Any ideas on this maybe?

Many thanks for any comments.