Problem with web statistics from different sources

I've collected a bunch of statistical data from such sources as AWStats, Google Analytics, SAS and Piwik. The problem is that when I compare such categories as page views, keywords etc., those applications all show different results. Why is that???

Thanks!

They all have their own idea what a visit is...visitors is a difficult measure because a single IP can have thousands of different people behind it(a corporate firewall, for example), so programs only estimate unique visitors, there is no way to know for sure how many people there were unless they were logged into Google or Facebook(which is what both Google and FB ultimately want, everyone tracked and monitored...)

For pageviews, the configurations vary too....some programs will report a pageview only if it matches html, htm or php, for example.

Hits is the only non ambiguous measure because a hit is a hit no matter where it happens, but the problem with hits is it doesn't mean much for marketing, hits are more relevant for server load and optimization purposes....

So probably Analytics is the one that should be used when investigatig visits from Google, right...?

parasitus84 said:

So probably Analytics is the one that should be used when investigatig visits from Google, right...?

Click to expand...

Analytics will track the client side and it may even ID the person by their Google account the last logged into, so yes, it's the more precise visitor count out there today.

You said it'sd difficult to identify individual clicks when using more than one pc on a single IP. What about cookie files? Shouldn't that be helpful for the analysis tools to identify single users?

Google Analytics will usually be off by at least 1-2% because some people like myself block it via browser plugins