Geekhall.net has 10 days now, to know, if people even come to this site I’ve put 2 statistics applications. One is from my hosting provider, the second one is Google Analitycs. Well, here’s the trouble begin. They show totally different things, and it is hard to judge, which os more accurate, and this article will be exactly about that.
Lest begin with my hosting provider statisitcs.
From what can be seen, in past 10 days I had 2506 unique visitors, with 227 uniques average per day. Well, that’s good for a blog having only 10 days right? :). Going deeper into the statistics shows me that almost 45% of my traffic comes from USA and Canada. Very Good :).
Seeing those statistics make me happy. It makes me feel, that I’m writing some useful stuff for people who need this knowledge.
But then, I go to Google Analitycs and this is what I see:
What the hell? 548 visits and 374 visitors? That’s nearly 7 times less, than from my hosting provider statistics!
The only thing which was common for both stats is that most of the traffic is from USA and Canada, at least that good right? :)
So I was getting little worried and started searching why it is happening like that. And come with some conclusions:
- I’ve placed Google Analitycs code at the very end of my site (in end.php file – the last loading possible), that means it only counts, when everything loaded properly. But testing in all major browser, using proxies and without proxies, indicates that my site has NO PROBLEM with loading to the end, and furthermore it is going pretty fast (good hosting provider, hehe :) )
- Statistics application provided by my hosting service are more accurate, because they “start the site”. If someone is entering my site (even if this means the whole site for some reasons won’t load in all) he is already counted to the statistics.
- Google analytics for some reasons has problems with identifying European sources of traffic. From what I’ve read almost 20% of my traffic comes from Spain, France, Germany and Switzerland.
- Statistics provided by my host also counts me (even if I go in Admin area), but, I log 1-2 daily so the difference should not be so much right (fo sure NOT 7 times more traffic from Admin aera :) )
Well, my conclusion – both statistics gives me quite much information about peoples visitng my sites, but my host provider stats are more accurate to that, what actually is going on with my site. Google analytics are good to know how much time they spend on my site and from where exactly does the traffic comes.
In my opiniopn Google Analitycs is not the best stat application, but if they improve, it will be really powerful tool for webmasters.
I should propably have a 3rd party stats application – I’ll have better comparison and know more, about users. I recommend You to do the same :
