extreme tracking vs analytics

close or not close

[eljefe3]

I've been thinking about selling an old site I have that has been tracked with analytics. I then saw another site that has been tracked with extremetracking which showed a much higher unique count, and that was because this site showed all referrers ( I believe) that called a file from the site being tracked.

If I was using the method of what I believe extremetracking uses, then my number would be 100 fold over analytics as analytics does not count a unique visitor as a file being called from another site. Awststats does however count the same as extremetracking ( I believe) which show way more than analytics as far as unique visitors and page views.

So the question is, has anyone used both for a site that allows other sites/users to call files from the site in question?

[cgrantski]

When you say "analytics" do you mean the product Google Analytics, or some other analytics program?

[eljefe3]

hmm, didn't know there was another tracking program out there called analytics. Yes we are speaking of google analytics here ( urchin).

[cgrantski]

"analytics" actually means a class of software and ASP site measuring products, of which there are lots, some with "analytics" in the name.

Anyway, regarding your original question. AWSTATS uses log files which will in fact show all visits that requested an image, doc, exe file (pdf, wmv, anything) without actually requesting a page file. Google Analytics and other tag-based systems are only capable of recording requests for page files, and only page files that have the GA tag. The site can be coded so that GA also records requests for image files, but those requests get recorded by GA only if the visitor was on a tagged page in the first place.

So, if you have a lot of people requesting your image, doc, exe, swf, or other files without going through one of your pages, then Google Analytics will in fact miss all that traffic.

Your solution is to get your server logs and analyze them using analytics software of some kind, such as AWSTATS.

As for "extremetracking", it seems to use a tag, so your assessment of what it tracks puzzles me. I looked at their tag and instructions and it doesn't do anything that would allow tracking of non-HTML requests, so it should get the same data as Google Analytics.