AWStats or Google Analytics? Which is more accurate?

Question

I have AWStats provided my hosting service provider. I have google analytics as well setup. But both show different statistics whom should I trust? Whats more accurate of these two? Should I use something else for getting accurate statistics.

Liveried

You bear in mind that Analytics only updates every 6-8 hours, while AWStats have "live" logs AFAIK? – Fries

even though the difference in the statistics are a way different. – Liveried

Answer 1

They measure in different ways. AWStats uses analyzed server logs, and they include crawlers and bots, as well as end users with JavaScript disabled and Google Analytics opt-out users, none of which Google Analytics measures.

AWStats constructs visits from a combination of hits in the server logs from their IP address, so they don't follow a user who visits from multiple locations, or who has a dynamic IP address, and they count multiple users from the same IP address as being the same visitor. Google Analytics uses browser-specific cookies to track visitors multiple times in multiple locations. Both can have a tendency to either inflate or deflate numbers. So, server logs could count multiple people on the same network as the same person, but they also double count as you move around, and have no idea how to deal with dynamic IP addresses. Google Analytics can't track one person across their multiple browsers.

So, the right answer, in general, is that no analytics tracking is ever 100%, that the numbers should always be treated as approximations, and that every number you look at should be considered in the context of how its tracked and only compared to numbers gathered in similar contexts. The general trend is that AWStats overstates numbers and that Google Analytics understates them, but that's not an ironclad rule.

Verdieverdigris

And this is why with any web tracking tool, you should be looking at TRENDS, how numbers go up or down over X time. – Minhminho

Thanks for this deep answer. I was wondering how AWStats inflates numbers and that Google Analytics understates numbers. – Alvera

Answer 2

I set up a test on my website to compare unique users via Google vs AWStats. On the website I made a view counter that stored unique IP addresses, and measured the hits for a single page, within a few hours. I then looked through the ip logs and removed any crawlers, and compared this to what AWStats measured and Google.

The view counter measured what I will call 100% AWStats was around 125-150% of view count Google was 25-40% of view count

This was/is consistent. My conclusion is that Google seems to always under report and AWStats over report. I think the true figure is somewhere in the middle, but slightly closer to AWStats than Google. So if Google says you get 100 uniques and AWStats says 500, I would personally think the actual amount is closer to 300. This is not completely scientific and it would be great for others to replicate this test.

Rosenquist

How could AWStats "over-report"? That would mean that the data is unreliably inflated? – Instance

Answer 3

Doesn't awstat track image hits as well?

So if your page has 10 images, that's 10 hits per user.

Seems highly inaccurate gauge if that's the case.

Arvizu

It depends what you are tracking: page views vs. requests. Obviously if what is tracked is the html file, then that would represent a single request, whereas the total number of requests for all files would be much higher. It is not difficult to figure out what to look at. – Instance

Answer 4

Note that if you use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare, Akamai, etc., that Awstats will not be aware of any traffic handled by the CDN. You will have to rely on stats provided by the CDN, or on page javascript solutions like Google Analytics.

Graupel