I'm Not Impressed. From A Statistical Point Of View.

Stats. We all love them. We all hate them. They feed us with lots of information about our blogs and there are a ton of software packages and services out there to please all of us.

But which ones really work the way they should?

We have AWStats on our server. I have used AWStats to watch the stats on my site for several years now. Because it is installed on the server and gets its information directly from the server logs, I believe it to be the most reliable. Am I wrong?

Here on the Site O' Schtuff, I am testing StatCounter, SiteMeter, and Clicky. AWStats does not do the "daily" referral and other stats breakdown the way I would like, so I figured it would not hurt to see how well the others added up.

The first thing I compared was the number of page views.

Two weeks ago, on the 8th, AWStats reported 6,642 page views, but StatCounter only showed 3,454 page loads. SiteMeter reported the lowest number at 2,500 page views, and Clicky said their had been 2,684.

If I look at the visits reported for the 8th, AWStats, reports 2,615 total visits yet StatCounter shows 3,069 unique visitors. SiteMeter reports 2,600 visits and Clicky says there were only 1,397.

Obviously, something ain't right. I have yet to see a consistent number from any of the packages. In fact, they are all so far off, I don't think any of them are actually accurate.

I noticed something else while preparing to write this post.

I get my clicky stats via their nifty RSS feeds. I check them a few times throughout the day, but actually read them each evening. When I checked the numbers this morning I found something quite disturbing.

The numbers being shown for total visitors and page views this morning are different than the numbers that were reported last night. In fact, the numbers are quite a bit lower today than they were last night, which makes me wonder why they "adjusted" them?

While it's nice to see the daily referral reports, it's not very useful if the numbers are not accurate. Needless to say, I will be dropping a few of these packages later today.