Google stats lies?

wizard91 · 17 Apr 2007 at 19:40

Well I use google stats for my website, and I have always been pleased with it, not only does it look good, its easy and reliable. But after looking through my webalizer stats given to me from my webhost I realise they are completely different from one another.

Google tells me I have had 47 visits. Mainly from the UK, some from the US, France, Portugal, Ukraine and the Philippines.

However Webalizer tells me I have had 2000+ unique visits, and here is the list of countries they are from

US Commercial
United Kingdom
Network
Unresolved/Unknown
France
Old style Arpanet (arpa)
Australia
Netherlands
Finland
Cyprus
Ireland
Non-Profit Organization
Czech Republic
Greece
US Educational
Denmark
Japan
New Zealand (Aotearoa)
Canada
Poland
Portugal
Sweden
Norway
Bulgaria
Germany
Seychelles
United Arab Emirates
Austria
Belgium
Bolivia

Its a big long list, some arent countries I know, but they were on the list so I copied them. The rest of the statistics are way higher and different too, why are they both so different? My code is placed correctly on my website too, has this happened to anyone else? :confused:

So who should I trust? Google, or Webalizer?

Pho · 17 Apr 2007 at 19:42

Maybe the log file which webalizer is using is pretty old, and so has lots of entries? Perhaps you'd be better off with a fresh log file and comparing the two.

wizard91 · 17 Apr 2007 at 19:46

My website and whole hosting account is only about 2 weeks old, and I was looking at the stats for this month though lol.

psyr33n · 17 Apr 2007 at 19:52

Webalizer is full of **** from my experience. Trust Google Analytics as it's custom inserted (tracks only the pages you want) and doesn't rely on perhaps unreliable server files - it tracks purely client visits to your page.

Augmented · 17 Apr 2007 at 20:15

Analytics is javascript based so it won't log traffic from visitors like search engine spiders, spam-bots, exploit sniffing scripts, text-browsers and so on. Webalizer analyses the log file, so will include all the dirty traffic alongside the usable traffic.

Trust Webalizer, but also trust Analytics and any other stats package you have at hand to get the best idea of your genuine stats. They all have different ideas of what constitutes a hit, what a 'unique' is and so on.

On the basis of that, you probably have had 2000 uniques this month, but only 47 of them constituted a genuine visitor.

Usher · 17 Apr 2007 at 20:24

Webaliser shows googlebot visits my site every day when I am sure it doesn't

You have to be certain whether its hits or visits that are counted also
This confuses a lot of people who gleefully think 200 hits are 200 visits when in fact 200 hits can be from just 10 visits or less, a hit is clocked for each seperate download which may be on a page i.e if you click on a picture or link
it will register a hit.

wizard91 · 17 Apr 2007 at 20:41

Usher said:
Webaliser shows googlebot visits my site every day when I am sure it doesn't

You have to be certain whether its hits or visits that are counted also
This confuses a lot of people who gleefully think 200 hits are 200 visits when in fact 200 hits can be from just 10 visits or less, a hit is clocked for each seperate download which may be on a page i.e if you click on a picture or link
it will register a hit.

Yeah it also counts a lot of hits for people who use this forum who download my signature, its hosted on my website. But I wasnt confusing the hits with unique visitors.

But I guess Google stats is the way to go.