Net Applications stats Vs Google Analytics stats

monthly stats seem different for both?

[The_Grunt]

Hi folks,

Im at this game for about 6 months now, and I am looking at monthly stats between Google analytics and Net Applications (zstats).

The page views and unique visitors are different for both. I don't know why this would be? Even when I specify organic visitors in Google analytics, the figure is different to net applications.
I'm at a loss....

[mattpone]

its very rare for two analytics packages to tie up exactly -ive always had discrepancies of 10-15% between Index Tools and Google Analytics

how much difference do u see between the analytics packages?

[The_Grunt]

basicaly, it might say 182 visitors on net apps, and then a few thousand page views on google analytics...surely one must be picking up different infor than the other for the figures to be this different...?

[The_Grunt]

sorry, if that did not make sense, i meant 182 page views...

[mattpone]

ah i see - yeah thats quite a big discrepancy for sure!

i would think that bot visits might be affecting the figures, but google analytics wouldnt show them?

have a look at the traffic sources and compare them - is there any particular source that one application is counting but the other isnt?

[The_Grunt]

yeah, thats what i got to check in detail, the traffic sources.ill post up after i check that out...

[ewanfisher]

bots, bots, bots and more bots!

The number or robots, and methods to identify them, increases every day. From an analytics point of view this is _very_ annoying. Each analytics company will have their own list of robot identifiers. This can extremely effect the statistics from one source to another.

It is also possible, depending on the tracking code, that some visitors are not executing some tracking code due to their security preferences.

[mattpone]

im fast reaching the conclusion that google analytics is going to be the most accurate (and free!) option?

the lovely folks in our IT dept have just destroyed our webtrends server and lost all our historic data (no backup either)

we also have index tools on several of our sites, but I'm struggling to justify renewing indextools or webtrends due to the cost and the fact google analytics does pretty much everything they do now - and its easier to use!

can anyone help me justify their cost?

[rank]

bit late to this post but the fact that no one has replied to your question seems to speak volumes.

i personally, have really struggled with getting any sort of reasonable service from Google analytics, and that's why i'm not looking for an alternative (a search which actually let me to this trail..)

[Receptional Andy]

Well indextools is now a different prospect altogether, as it is Yahoo's soon to be free analytics package. Personally, I consider it to be superior to Google Analytics in almost all respects.

A couple of reasons why I think Google analytics numbers can be off for undesirable reasons - it doesn't track visitors with javascript disabled, and it seems to be blocked by a higher percentage of users than some of the competition.

Don't get me wrong, as the first of the high-level free analytics packages it's a great solution, but as a user of a plethora of analytics systems, it certainly isn't my favourite.