tedster - 3:10 am on Apr 11, 2002 (gmt 0)

The most valuable information I find from stats is not what the data is, in absolute terms, but how those numbers change over time. As you may have discovered, different packages can give different results for the same set of logs - and definitions of terms are not exactly standardized.

So putting too much importance on the absolute value of a number in any given report is a questionable practice. But looking for % changes from one period to the next is exceptionally useful, especially when bumped up against a timeline of website changes.

I also find it's very important to "clean" or filter the raw logs intelligently to come as close as you can to comparing apples to apples on a clean baseline. For example, for many stats, it's good to eliminate spider hits, or "in-house" website use (filtered out by IP).