AWStats or Google Analytics? Which is more accurate?

Question

I have AWStats providing my hosting provider. I have Google analytics as well as customization. But both show different statistics, who should I trust? Which is more accurate of these two? Should I use something else to get accurate statistics.

Answer 1

They are measured in different ways. AWStats uses analyzed log logs, and they include crawlers and bots, as well as end users with JavaScript disabled and Google Analytics users, none of which matter in Google Analytics.

AWStats creates visits from a combination of views in server logs from their IP address, so they do not follow a user who visits multiple locations or has a dynamic IP address, and counts multiple users from the same IP address as one visitor. Google Analytics uses browser cookies to track visitors several times in several places. Both may have a tendency to inflate or deflate numbers. Thus, server logs can be counted by several people on the same network as the same person, but they also double the count when moving and have no idea how to handle dynamic IP addresses. Google Analytics cannot track a single user across browsers.

So the correct answer, in general, is that no analytics tracking will ever be 100%, that numbers should always be considered approximations, and that every number you look at should be viewed in the context of how its tracked and only compared to numbers collected in similar contexts. The general trend is that AWStats is exaggerating numbers and that Google Analytics is downplaying them, but this is not an obscene rule.

Answer 2

I installed a test on my website to compare unique users through Google vs AWStats. On the website, I made a view counter that stored unique IP addresses and measured hits for one page for several hours. Then I looked at the ip logs and removed all the crawlers and compared this to what AWStats and Google measured.

The view counter measured what I would call 100% AWStats was about 125-150% of the number of views Google was 25-40% of the number of views

This has been / has been agreed. My conclusion is that Google seems to be always in the report and AWStats for the report. I think the real figure is somewhere in the middle, but a little closer to AWStats than to Google. Therefore, if Google claims that you get 100 unique data, and AWStats says 500, I personally think that the actual amount is close to 300. This is not entirely scientific, and it would be great if others would repeat this test.

Answer 3

Does the image track distort images?

So, if your page has 10 images, these are 10 hits per user.

This seems to be wrong.

Answer 4

Please note: if you use a content delivery network (CDN) such as Cloudflare, Akamai, etc., that Awstats will not be aware of any traffic processed by the CDN. You will have to rely on statistics provided by CDN, or on pages of javascript solutions such as Google Analytics.