Question:  Why is there such a disparity between Google Analytics and AWStats reports?

Answer:  Often there are discrepancies between analytics programs. Primarily due to the technology, terms and filtering processes used.

Google Analytics (GA) uses a JavaScript technique, so if the pages fail to load the page is not recorded. This does not effect LogFile driven analytics that use the page requests coming into the Web Server, which is what AWStats uses.

However, GA also does filter out known Robots that index the site.  Many programs do not. This could severly effect the totals.

There is a great description of how GA terms are defined here:
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=57164&hl=en_US

You will have to check definitions on your own Analytic programs to note the differences.

--- Some key terms are Vistors and not Visits:

As Decribed Below:

Visits vs. Visitors

Analytics measures both visits and visitors in your account. Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.

The initial session by a user during any given date range is considered to be an additional visit and an additional visitor. Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits, but not as additional visitors.

--- or another often misunderstood analytics term/indicator is the following:

Pageviews vs. Unique Pageviews

A pageview is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a visitor hits reload after reaching the page, this will be counted as an additional pageview. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview will be recorded as well.

A unique pageview, as seen in the Top Content report, aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique pageview represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.

The bottom line is that you need to understand what the reports are telling you and then determine if the activity is meeting your business goal.  Your internet marketing consultant can help you determine what is meaningful and what is not.

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