Logs: Google Analytics vs AWStats
In this article, we will talk about AWStats and Google Analytics and how they affect you and/or your business.
If you strip away all the features, they both do roughly the same thing; track visitors as they visit your website. However, they show and analyze the data in different ways.
There is a number of reasons the results may be different. One of the major reasons is because Google Analytics uses JavaScript to report the tracking information. Because some visitors may have JavaScript disabled, those visitors may not be reported by Google Analytics.
Also, “visitors” is a term that AWStats uses differently than Google Analytics. Because of this, the numbers may also appear to be different between the two systems. AWStats pulls visitors directly from the server logs and is the most accurate, while Google Analytics is very good at business analytics.
This depends on what you are looking to get from your logs. If you are a person looking for more detailed information about the network, and bandwidth usage, AWStats is your best bet. However, if you are more focused on the business aspect of your website and how to grow your company, Google Analytics gives you much better information regarding the demographics, behavior and traffic sources for your visitors.
If you are a business looking for detailed information about how your visitors behave on your website, we highly recommend that you look into Google Analytics. If you don’t need detailed demographics about your visitors and just want to track basic page views and bandwidth, AWStats may be all you need.
Both solutions are free, and AWStats comes enabled on all of our hosting products. If you are interested in trying Google Analytics on your website, please see our other articles on the subject by clicking here.
wesly April 25, 2014 at 6:41 am
Thanks for your knowledge. I was searching for the same.
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Miguel Andres Ceballos July 2, 2014 at 12:18 pm
Thanks for the advice. The difference between the 2 is big. According to GA I had arround 2000 page views in June. According to Awstats, I had over 22,000 views (yes, more than 10 times). Wich one is more accurate and reliable)
Phillip Joe December 29, 2014 at 10:44 am
Thanks for this talking about the difference between GA and Awstats, but like other posters, my numbers have been significantly different for the two. On Awstats, I receive 2,700 unique visitors for the month and for Google analytics I received only 82 unique visits, these number are completely different, I wouldn’t even feel comfortable coming up with an average between the two. What would you recommend?
James Davey December 29, 2014 at 12:07 pm
Hi Phillip.
That is quite the difference, yes. There may be something else going on there, and our support team can certainly take a look for you. Have you opened a ticket with them?