There are so many systems out there to analyze your website’s data, but it remains unknown on who provides the most accurate data. I’m too curious on how accurate is my Google Analytics and Statcounter data after Seolad made a comparison between Google Analytics, Awstat and Alexa statistics before. As pointed out by him, the different figures between them are mainly due to the different methods of data collection.
Google Analytics and Statcounter are both using Javascript, which is required to be installed on each of your web pages. From there the hit (page view, visit) will be calculated based on their own algorithm.
How I build the graph?
To have a better visibility and comparison of the data between these 2 main statistics, I have downloaded the data and build my own chart in Excel.
Steps taken to get more accurate data
Before that, to get a more accurate result, I have blocked any visits from my own IP (in certain range) from being counted. Furthermore, this is one of my websites that I rarely visit, just to be sure that I’ll get pretty much accurate stats. Apart from that, I set both Google Analytics and Statcounter to use similar Timezone, GMT + 8.
The comparison
The result is quite surprising. I’m under impression that they’ll likely have almost similar numbers, but I was totally wrong. The difference between them is quite huge. But if we notice, their graph pattern is almost similar. There are similar uptrend and downtrend of visitors and page views shown by both systems, indicating that they’re noticing of sudden spike but they’re differentiated by the calculation method.
Statcounter tracks more visits compared to Google Analytics. This is in contrast with the page views where Google Analytics tracks more pageviews than statcounter. Overall, Analytics has 5.57 page/visit while Statcounter has 3.96 page/visit.
My assumptions on why there are difference between these 2 stats
Algorithm – This should be the main reason why the stats is diffferent. Eg: In statcounter there is one field called Maximum Visit Length used to calculate your unique and returning visitors from a cookie. I accept the default value which is 30 minutes. The time period might be different in Google Analytics and there is no way to change it.
Intermittent network connection or hardware failure – Unless the server is totally down, some of the stats might be lost. But there are still possibilities of network connection failure causing this difference.
Visitors resetting the cookie – Since cookie is used to calculate this, resetting the cookies will provide a different number for sure.
My own visits – My IP address keeps on changing since it is located on DHCP. But it shouldn’t cause huge difference since I have set to block the IP within certain range. Apart from that, there might be a visit from site admin (such as my wife).
All the while, my favorite statistics is Stacounter even though it provides a limited log for free usage. I have written before on how to drill down your visitors and contents, which is one the funtion that I love, and is still lacking in Google Analytics. As of know, I still can’t answer which one is the most accurate, so the choice is yours.
