Webalizer vs. Awstats

I would definitely recommend installing Google Analytics to your website instead of using these stats as it will give you a more indepth understanding of who your visitors are, where they are coming from and which pages on your website are the most popular and how your visitors are flowing through your website or where they are bouncing (leaving from the same page they landed on).

If you need help installing Google Analytics on your website and need a little bit of background about this, let me know as I have a free report on it that I can send you - no sign up required!!

Lesley

I am using http://www.modlogan.org/, its similar to webalizer.

As does webalizer...... which, therefore, is also 100% accurate

That is my thoughts exatcly. I have always Awstats and feel its the best program for me. I have never been a real fan of Google Analytics and most of the time when I visit a site the site takes awhile to load and when you look at the status bar it shows Loading Google Analytics or something to that effect.

Bottom line is to use what works for you and provides the necessary bells and whistles.

Yeah another one for Awstats.

But you have to scroll to the bottom of the page to see the actual searches. The numbers at the top reflects the bots and image file downloads. Try one of those directory submitters and watch your "hit" counter go crazy, but scroll to the bottom and view the search phrases and you'll see very different numbers in the amount of searches.

Yes Its a bit hard to set up for the non technical person, but I agree, this one is what you need. Its tracking is awesome.

Neither Webalizer or Awstats are accurate unless you are prepared to go through and analyze and delete all the bots and rubbish that continually bombard websites.

Google Analytics may look lean, but it's accurate and it the only stats that are accepted by Flippa.com buyers and other astute site purchasers.

If I want to BS someone I will quote either Webalizer or Awstats.

One of my site AwStats

Yesterday's traffic 378 Visits Traffic this month 13682 Visits Traffic last month 38112 Visits

Would you be happy if I quoted AwStats? AwStats includes spammers, robots, all number of mongrel visits/hits.

Same site:

Google Analytics this month:

388


Unique Visitors
309
Last month: 1,435

If I want to sell you this site I will quote AwStats. Please buy me, look at all the hits!

If I am being honest I will quote Google Analytics.

This is a broad statement that may be correct in some ways and incorrect in other ways.

If you are talking about getting the best idea of how many "real" people are visting your site and how they are interacting with it (i.e., which pages they are visiting, their time per page and per session, their visitation path, etc.), then you are correct that GA probably gives you the most accurate picture of your traffic.

However, if you are talking about getting an accurate picture of the overall number of visits to your site (including bot visits), then AWStats is more accurate. This is because AWStats pulls its numbers directly off your server, while GA relies on JavaScript and cookies to capture this info. Since a certain number of people disallow JS and/or cookies while browsing, GA will not have any reflection of these visits in its data and thus its numbers are under-reported.

So which should you use?

Since both types of numbers are important to most website owners like us, we use both GA and AWStats to track our traffic numbers. We consider the GA stats to be more "qualitative" and they help us track and measure our SEO, Social and marketing efforts, while AWStats are more "quantitative" and they help us measure our bandwidth needs and overall traffic to our sites.

Best Regards,

Tom