I've been using Google Analytics on several of my websites, it's a wonderful tool that provides you with invaluable information about user behavior on your website.
The aim of this post is to show the big difference in measuring unique visitors, pageviews etc between this two tools.
Militz.nu is a domain availability tool, it lists all quarantine domains under the top level domain .se
This is a chart of statistic of this domain: Militz.nu for the period: 2/11/2007 - 2/17/2007
| Messures |
Google Analytics |
Webtrends |
| Unique Visitors |
521 |
2132 |
| Pageviews |
2638 |
16287 |
| Average Visit Length (sec) |
0-10 |
23:58 |
| Returning Visitors |
84,9% |
67% |
Top 5 referring sites according to Webtrends
| Sites |
Visits |
| No Referrer |
1,812 |
| http://www.militz.nu/ |
932 |
| http://www.google.com/ |
182 |
| http://www.google.se/ |
130 |
| http://search.msn.se/ |
19 |
Top 5 referring sites according to Google analytics
| Sites |
Visits |
| google[organic] |
415 |
| (direct)[(none)] |
109 |
| msn (search.msn.com) |
20 |
| eniro.se |
7 |
| yahoo[organic] |
6 |
Top 5 search keyword
| Google Analytics |
Webtrends |
| laserab.se |
www.happybirthday.se |
| webgenerator.se |
fanerdun |
| www.horoskop.se |
www.salomon.se |
| www.salomon.se |
www.bygganytt.se |
| www.facebook.se |
seatclubsweden |
The main problem with this big difference is that when u need to publices your weblogs to compare your website with others there are no real numbers to rely on. Personally i prefer google analytics as a tool to track user behavior, but webtrends as a tool for facts and figures.