Best Program For Analytics?

[chesa7]

I am currently using Google Analytics but wonder if there are other programs that you would recommend?

Laura

[randykirk]

Not sure what info you are looking for or why you need something beyond google. There are lots of free and paid services to track hits on your site. Hopefully including your website provider.

[Logan]

I think that is exactly part of answering the question "what info you are looking for". For the most part Google Analytics will get you what you need, although I also use www.hittail.com because I like the keyword reporting it provides. Google Analytics can provide a lot of the same information, if I dig to the page level view and look at keyword referrals.

For more about hittail, see this thread about it here -
http://www.smallbusinessbrief.com/fo...ad.php?t=10330

Part of asking, I guess, is a check to make sure we're not missing something by just relying on GA. For the most part, I don't think most are.

If anything, does anyone here do conversion tracking and if so how? that is usually the least lacking aspect of analytics imo. and if that is addressed, are you tracking offline also - such as phone calls. anyone?

[chesa7]

Google Analytics just doesn't seem to be capturing all the data, for example, my host data shows over twice as many visitors a day as Google does. I'm just afraid that what I am seeing is not acurrate or that data is missing.

I will look inot the program you recoemnded -- thank you!

Laura

[Logan]

Hi Laura, you're welcome. Regarding your stats between the host and Google Analytics not matching up, based on my experiences that is very typical. In fact, you may drive yourself crazy if you try to get any two stats programs to match exactly. I find that often the biggest discrepancy occurs when one stats program includes 'bots' (search engines, and others) while the other doesn't. I prefer to view stats with bots excluded as I'm interested in knowing about actual visitors to the site - but even then getting all the bots excluded or the bots excluded between two different programs may vary.

My approach, consider the data first and track each program against itself. Comparing GA vs Host Stats will cause difficulty because of the different data sets.

If you want to really get into this, then to get to the nut of things learn about reading and monitoring your log files. Every server keeps a raw log of it's activity. You can view this in .txt format and learn how to read what it means. If you understand your raw log files, you can sort/analyze that data and also compare against your various stats programs. The server log files are the only thing I know that truly gives you a true data set.

[Matt McGee]

Logan's answers are really great, esp. the one right above me about some software including bots, and others not including them.

In any case, there's no reason NOT to use more than one analytics package. You can run multiple packages without harming your site's performance, and having the variety of data should help you get closer to the actual truth. At a recent conference, some analytics experts suggested running three separate programs on your site to be safe.

[Dale King]

Originally Posted by randykirk

There are lots of free and paid services to track hits on your site.

Randy, hits are a meaningless statistic. Unique visitors is a much more accurate and relevant metric.

Dale King