Google Analytics is king?

[Guerreiro]

Hey everyone, i heard this question once during a conference and was wondering what everyone's thoughts on it are:

"Is Google Analytics the only program you can use to track visitors and analyze the data or are there different tools or methods?"

Naturally if this has already been asked once, strike this one and point me in the right direction.

Cheers

[Randy Ray]

There are lots of different tools you can use to analyze your visitor stats. I like Google Analytics, but it's not the only game in town. Some of the other applications charge a fee though.

[cprpoker]

Excatly, there are a TON of tools out there for analytics tracking. I highly recommend Google Analytics. I haven't heard of a tool that can come close in terms of functionality/reporting for the price (free).

I'd imagine that the reports that Analytics provides is more than enough for the majority of webmasters. Just my opinion.

[leporello]

I like the data from stat counter as well but it only saves 500 visits in a log for free users.

[Michael Martinez]

People like Google Analytics because the reports are pretty but the data is usually incomplete (I've never really seen good data from Google Analytics and I have looked at a LOT of sites' Google Analytics reports).

If your server is configured to capture its own Web log data, you would do best to buy one of the packages that analyzes your log data. The free tools only show you part of the picture.

[Knup]

I use Analytics... Michael - could you expand some more on what is incomplete? THis is the first i've heard/read of this.

[PokerSoftwareGuy]

I use Analytics... Michael - could you expand some more on what is incomplete? THis is the first i've heard/read of this.

I'm not Michael, but I would agree: Analytics is a descent tool, but you only get a part of the picture. For me for instance that run and have run sites which you can correlate directly to income, you want to stack that data up against actual income, which is of course what it boils down to.

dont get me wrong: I do use analytics and have it on my sites. but for the boil down data and really custom reporting, I store the log data in a database and correlate that with userid, income activities, referrals and so on.

We also do split tests and correlate landing pages performance with income and other metrics, something Analytics can't do.

It is of course up to the individual site owner to decide what type of data they need to look at, and in our case, we built it in-house and use as a compliment to analytics.

[Michael Martinez]

Comparing Google Analytics to my own server log data, I find that they miss the vast majority of search referrals from non-Google search engines. They also miss a lot of the referral string data because of that.

Google Analytics is not alone in this deficiency. Most if not all Javascript-based analytics services underreport from 25-33% of your traffic.

[Guerreiro]

Thanks for all the input. I hear a lot of for free use, but i think I would not mind paying something to have the data analyzed thoroughly as long as it helps me and the package or software does a better job than Analytics. For the paid software where should I go? I heard of Crazy Egg – visualize your visitors but this is just for seeing what the visitors do on your site in a visual way.

[Squizzel]

does anyone feel cocerned about google knowing everything about you and the websites you run. If your not doing stuff thats 100% whitehat and you have all your websites linking to the same google account you are lol stupid.