VPS Hosting Blog

Web Analytics:Awstats and google Analytics(GA)

Web Analytics.

It is the process of tracking , collecting and analyzing data of the visitors of the website. It provides the website owner about the visitors and its interaction with the website. This software helps the owner to calculate visits per keyword and it can also monitor visits from domain URLs such as google,yahoo,msn, other search engines. Website Analytics tells us if our website visitors came from paid listings, organic listings, email marketing campaigns, affiliate programs or other direct referrals. In sum, Website Analytics tracks visitors and marketing campaign efficiencies so that the return on your advertising investment can be optimized.

Awstats and google Analytics(GA):

These are the small utilities for analyzing data from internet. Data is visually presented within reports by tables and bar graphs. These tools are referred as web analytics reporting tool.

Lets take an overview of both.

Awstats is included in Cpanel and GA is a third party plug-in which can be added to your site. Awstats uses the technology called log file analysis, whereas GA uses page tagging which uses JavaScript on each page to notify a third –party server when a page is rendered by a web browser. The difference between these two technologies is because of two reasons mentioned below.

Caching File : If a visitor has a file caching enabled on his web browser then the request to the file he already visited will not be sent to the server and the local copy will be visited. As the result Awstats will not detect the second visit or we can say the preceding visits.

Page Tagging: It relies on Visitors web browser providing the analytical information

Now, The advantage of logfile analysis is that the data is already logged by your webserver. Each visit is rcorded by the web server. So the data is directly stored on the server not relying on third party server.Also,it also provides the information about visits from search engines and spiders which is useful in SEO.

Pagetagging has its own advantages, javascript is called evrytime the page is loaded.Its easy to record the visitors information even if they are loading the pages locally from cache.

You can use this two at the same time

Bookmark Me