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Awstats Vs. Google Analytics Traffic Stats

analytics-awstatsI used to love awstats, I though it was very good and the numbers always made me happy. Because Awstats actually inflates your traffic stats almost twice as much as G-Analytics.

Okay let’s do a little comparison: Awstats vs G-Analytics.

Here’s a website of mine. It get’s 500-1000+ daily visitors depending on which traffic stats you look at.

I will be showing you stats for the month of April, 2014.

 

This is my G-Analytics stats, it shows about 500-600 visitors a day.

g-analytics-vs-awstats

This is my awstats showing about 950-1200 visitors a day for the same website. This is twice as many than from G-Analytics stats.

awstats-vs-analytics

The G-Analytics traffic stats by countries

analytics-countries

The awstats traffic stats by countries. The top countries are similar to that of G-Analytics, but after the 5th country, the list gets quite different.

awstats-countries

Here’s the G-Analytics referral traffic stats

analytics-referrer

Here’s the awstats referral traffic stats. Awstats shows that google sent 17,000+ visits to my site; whereas G-Analytics shows 13,631 visits from google. All the other referrals from awstats shows almost twice as many than from G-Analytics.

awstats-referrers

So which one is better Awstats or G-Analytics?

G-Analytics obviously shows less number of hits than compared with awstats.

The thing with awstats is that it tracks EVERYTHING, every hit, everytime you log into your admin panel, every bot hit, and every image hit! G-Analytics on the other hand only tracks the pages that you’ve installed the G-Analytics codes on. So if you don’t setup the G-Analytics code inside your admin panel, then it will not record any hits there.

So which is more accurate? G-Analytics is a lot more reliable to see the true numbers of real visitors. Awstats data shows hits from the site admins, bots, spiders, and others that may not be relevant to you. But if you need to look at these sort of data, then awstats is better in that case. But for only real visitor stats, G-Analytics is the winner.

There are a ton more features with G-Analytics than compared with awstats:

  • Real time traffic stats
  • Heat maps where user clicks.
  • See more reliable search engine keywords
  • See user flows
  • See site speed
  • Sharing traffic data with other users
  • Setting up goals and conversion tracking
  • And overall G-Analytics just looks better than the old 1995 look of awstats.

So in this day and age, every single webmaster needs to have G-Analytics installed on their websites. It’s free and only take a few seconds to setup on your site.

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5 Comments

  1. Google Analytics is a MUST-have tool for webmaster for real time stats. Decisions based on this tool are relatively handy! i never think of using any other analytic tool because I am yet to see a better alternative to G-Analytics. Awstats could be helpful for some webmasters!

    This comment was left in kingged.com – the content syndication and social networking website for Internet marketers where this post was shared.

    Sunday – kingged.com contributor

    http://kingged.com/google-analytics-awstats/

  2. Google Analytics is obviously closer to the real stats. I have done this balance check some weeks back and found reasons to not consider awstats. They are really not accurate

    when I saw this post on kingged, I was so excited to see your side of the story. It just goes further to confirm that GA is more stable.

    Thanks for posting about it

  3. Truly speaking I have never heard about Awstats before. All I knew about tools for a site’s analysis is Google Analytics. When it comes to exploring some SEO factors too, I also tried Alexa service too.

    Both of these are great in their own respect. But, certainly Google Analytics is the leader in making thorough analysis for site’s stats, health, visitors demographics and much more has been integrated in the tool in recent time.

    The best thing about GA is its FREE to be used by web masters. Although one can purchase license too for some premium services.
    Thanks for sharing post on Kingged.com.

    1. Thanks for commenting. Awstats automatically comes with just about every CPanel hosting account. There’s also webalizer stats, and that thing is pretty inflated as well in terms of traffic data.

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