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Web Analytics Tools: Which is most accurate?

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The accuracy of web analytics tools gives the likes of me great concern. Having different numbers for my report gives me great worry as I cannot ascertain which is more accurate than the other. Shouldn’t they report the same numbers? Have you been wondering why different analytics tools report different numbers?

Why different numbers?

We often try to reconcile absolute numbers between different web analytics tools, we also often forget that they are different systems and as such collect their data differently. There are some factors that may affect the data and thus affect our reports. Some of these data include the following; Data Collection, Filtering, Cookies etc.

Data Collection:

Web Analytics Tools: Which is most accurate?While the data collection has to do with all the methods of collecting data, example from web server log files or using JavaScripts, they all have their various problems. Let’s look at collecting data from web server log files, when visitors surf a site, it is cached on their browsers and also proxy servers of the network provider. Some network providers have proxy web servers that cache your site (save a copy) so they can easily serve it on request easily to save bandwidth and cost. So when a page is requested from such network, it is saved and recorded on the web server log file and subsequent requests may not be recorded because they were served from the proxy servers. Same thing happens with a browser cache and this will also affect the number you get on your web analytics tools.

JavaScripts are used to record data by some web analytics tools but when a visitor leaves the site before the JavaScript records such visit, it will also affect the records. An effective method would be to place your JavaScripts on your site’s header but this may slow down your page load speed and I won’t advice such, placing it on the footer is better.

Must Read: My Favorite Web Analytics Tools

Filtering:

Sometimes robots and spiders crawl our sites looking for information, it could be search engine crawlers or other types of crawlers. I often see Google adsense crawlers on my site. Different web analytics tools use different methods to determine visitors to our sites and some of them may consider different user agents in different ways. This definitely affects the numbers and the reports these web analytics tools give us.

Cookies:

Different web analytics tools use different methods to determine unique visitors to a site, most often times use cookies. Google analytics use 1st party cookies to determine visits to a site, some other web analytics tools use 3rd part cookies to do same, some people block cookies on their browsers and as such make it difficult to track such users and thus affect the data collected from such users.

Web Analytics Tools Accuracy:

It will be ideal to say that NO web analytics tools CAN prove to be EXACTLY ACCURATE with its numbers. The above mentioned factors and in fact a whole lots of more can cause variations in values. I will consider it a waste of time chasing ABSOLUTE accuracy from any web analytics tool as you may never find one that can totally address all the issues that affect its result as most of the factors are determined by the visitors and not the analytics tools.

So asking which web analytics tools is most accurate is not simple or easy to answer. I see the analytics report as a measure of trend simply to know when I am doing well or not and I do not need ABSOLUTE figure to do so. When your site traffic improves from 1000 visitors a day to 100,000 a day, no analytics tool will report it 200 a day.

I use Google analytics tool with Statcounter and I am used to the variations in result but I enjoy using these tools to monitor the progress of my blog and it’s enough for me. But if you are really worried about the result, maybe you should consider some advanced and PREMIUM web analytics tools and I bet you will find a lot of them on Google search.

What web analytics tools do you use on your site? How much do you trust its reports? How do you ascertain its accuracy? Which web analytics tools can you say is the most accurate? Share your views with me using the comment form below, remember to subscribe to my RSS feed.

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Comments

  1. I often rely on Google Analytics and JetPack (WordPress) Stats. These analytics are good to determine the trends and progress rather than finding out the exact number of unique visitors. Though they are not accurate to the number, but are certainly a great tool to refer whenever you need to compare.

    Thanks for bringing this topic into discussion.

  3. Hello Nwosu,
    You really did kill this post brother and to be honest, i am loving the post. I am using also using Google analytic and webstatcounter, But i check my statcounter more frequent because they are more accurate and they give spots to tackle for traffic. Thanks

  5. Hi Nwosu,

    I’m afraid at the moment I only use Google analytics at a very basic level – I’m not too hot on the technical side of things! It’s useful to know, for future reference, that different tools are available – I’m not sure how important absolute accuracy is, provided their results aren’t way off beam.

    Sue

  9. Desmond, you are always good in bringing up cool topics. In my own opinion I have no option than to start using google analytics it seems to be little bit better.

  10. Hi Nwosu,

    I like Google Analytics but admittedly I can become more diligent in that department. As noted no tool is fool proof, and each is apt to err. Paying for a premium tool helps ease some anxiety in this area. Helpful breakdown here.

    One key: check analytics infrequently. I was cursed in the past by a common, hurtful habit. I checked stats every few minutes or hours. This attachment to outcomes forced me to miss what mattered most: making good friends through blogging and creating value.

    Thanks Nwosu,

    Ryan

  11. One way to improve accuracy of any javascript-based web reporting is to perform a tag audit. By ensuring that tags are correctly placed, correctly configured, and consistently firing, you can have a higher degree of confidence that the reports in what ever platform you use are more accurate. ObservePoint (www.observepoint.com) provides web site crawls that expose tagging problems as well as free tag debugger tools for Firefox and Chrome.

    Fair notice: I work for ObservePoint.

  14. I am glad you could confirm that no analytics tool is foolproof but i believe some tools are better than others as a result of the way they are configured and placed. Using ObservePoint i scanned my blog to find out i do not have any JavaScript error and i will definitely consider trying out the tool. Thanks for sharing…

  15. I’m glad you addressed this issue. Being in the blogging industry, you hear of many different tracking tools with Google Analytics always claimed to be the best. I suppose that’s true but it’s always good to have more than one tracking source. There’s no one perfect tracking tool that’ll catch all the data you need, so diversity is key. Thanks for sharing your insight with our bizsugar community.

    Ti

  16. Thanks Ti Roberts for visiting, i totally agree with you about using diverse web analytics tools to track your blog’s performance. No one analytics tool is perfect enough.

  19. Coming from a company that used Omniture and one that used GA I see value from both the paid and free service. In most respects you get what you pay for. While I love GA, the forced data sampling and limited integration with offline data can make things cumbersome at times, although they are making inroads on the latter. Omniture offered a lot under the hood, but changes may require a lot of lead time with development. In my ideal world both solutions would have been implemented.

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