Forum Moderators: DixonJones
Case in point: I am now in a position where I have to explain to my client why AW Stats failed to report all the Google AdWords clicks they are paying for to the tune of over 200 referrals.
Am I missing something? Is there a better way to track web stats? Or is this the best I can hope for?
The key here is probably not the quality of the software you are using for the analysis but the quality of the raw data you are feeding into it.
Start by making sure that any of the clickthroughs to your client's site from third parties are actually captured in the raw data they collect.
This could be as simple as making sure that referrers and query strings are recorded in your client's log.
It may involve your client needing to ensure that their pages (that visitor's land on after clicking through from a third party site) are non-cacheable. This will ensure that the content isn't fulfilled by an interim proxy somewhere and that a log entry is recorded by their server.
The client may even want to investigate some kind of page tagging solution to generate a data source for analysis rather than relying on logs.
Be assured that there are a lot of ways to get more accurate results and specific reporting issues (such as the one you have highlighted) can often be addressed.
Of course, web analytics is not a precise science and you will never see the whole picture due to a whole host of reasons (such as browsers rejecting cookies, browsers disabling javascript and java, proxies caching content etc.).
Ah... didn't know you could do that. And how would I make a site non-cacheable?
