So, you’ve been looking at your website stats from your control panel. Then you decide to use something like Google Analytics or Statcounter to double check your traffic. After a few days, you check your stats and you almost have a heart attack. Your stats are down – seriously down. What happened to your visitors?
There are many reasons. You’ll probably never find any two statistics systems that what will report the exact same results.
One reason is because they collect data in different ways. AWstats or any cpanel logs use server logs whereas Google Analytics or other system where you insert a javascript code into your template is browser based. Which means if a browser has turned off Javascript that could affect Analytics too.That takes out a small number right off the bat.
Also the way they count visitors are different especially when you have fancy ‘ajax’ stuff or iframes. Let’s say you have a frame on a page when you load that page I believe GA counts that as one view but any cpanel based stats will count that as two one for the page and one for the iframe.
Third, some server logs count crawlers and bots as views. So you get your page viewed even though it’s not a real person but a bot. Another thing, GA uses cookies which can be deleted by the visitor.
There’s no clear answer I suppose. The best thing is to use both, and watch the trends and growth as opposed to hard numbers.
Photo by Wagner Magni