who to trust index tools/webtrends/extreme/mint

[mattpone]

We are trialing several tracking packages but are getting widely varied statistics:

Index Tools (Visits) - 689
WebTrends (Visitors Who Visited Once - 1,834
Extreme - 307
Extreme V3 - 285
Mint - 223

Now I wouldnt expect extreme or mint to be that accurate but there is a huge difference between Index Tools (javascript based) and WebTrends (log file analysis) - I know we had 300 clicks from PPC and there is plenty of traffic from SEO so Index Tools isnt looking too accurate.

Does anyone know why there are such big differences? Which one do I trust the most?

[Terabytes]

some programs only list browser visits, and don't include bots crawling your site...as an example

some include bots and visits...giving a different total

some people have javascript turned off in their browser, they register different in certain statistics packages...some see them, some don't...

The comparison is like apples and oranges, they provide different visitor info based upon their design.

To me (IMHO) it all depends upon what traffic you want to see. I want it ALL, so that I can make sound judgements upon the data I see...

best of luck!
Tera

[mattpone]

Thanks

The bot point is not something I had considered actually.

All we really want to know about is human/browser visits, so Index Tools maybe a better indicator, I'll have a look at the number of bot visits webtrends lists....thanks again