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What do you guys use?

Im thinking of going with google analytics or sitemeter.

Are there better alternatives i am missing?

I use Analytics right now simply because it’s free. I’m going to be going with Mint in the near future though.

There’s also: Clicky and Piwik

Right now I have analytics and sitemeter. What are your thoughts with having two or more monitoring tools on a site? Or better just to have one?

I like to have two just so I can compare stats and ensure that they are not way off from each other. I only have one right now though.

My host gives 4 different monitoring things, and one is awstats. Still i go with Google Analytics…

My host gives 4 different monitoring things, and one is awstats. Still i go with Google Analytics…

I was never a fan of those built in stat applications that most hosts give you. I always found Webalizer and AWStats to difficult to read.

Google Analytics here as well. Meets most our needs, though I’m sure needs vary depending on the nature of the site.

Nowadays I pretty much only use Google Analytics although I do download the logs from time to time and parse them to get a proper reading as you can only really rely on Google Analytics for trend analysis and not any true data needs.

People may have Javascript turned off which would then not register a hit or on the other hand if they are a fast surfer then depending on where you place the GA code you may not get a hit also.

If for example you have your GA code at the end of the page then someone could quite easily click on a link to a page from a page which hasn’t quite loaded yet and get to what they need without the code ever even firing.

GA and those types of scripts should only ever be used for trend analysis and never any hard facts and figures. The only thing that will really tell you that is your actual server logs which are a royal pain to understand 😉

Best wishes,

Mark

GA and those types of scripts should only ever be used for trend analysis and never any hard facts and figures. The only thing that will really tell you that is your actual server logs which are a royal pain to understand 😉

I once spent about $900 on Urchin which combined a Javascript tracker with server logs. Highly accurate, easy to understand. The Google bought Urchin and Google Analytics was born. There “IS” a difference between server log data and other tracking tools using Javascript. Generally, I found server log data to be about 10%-12% higher than Javascript results like Analytics, probably for the reasons above—Javascript doesn’t get completed loaded before a user clicks to another page, and users have Javascript off.

Use it for trends and you’re probably OK.

Great feedback