google analytics vs. webalizer

[blackhorse]

I used to use the webalizer to do the web stats. Now for the new site I am building, I am including the google analytics codes now.

For the general public web site owners, if I already offer them the google analytics, do I still have to offer the webalizer stats any more?

In other words, what important stats data webalizer has and google analytics not have?

For the past years, only a few clients used the webalizer web stats I offered for their sites. And among these clients, when I replace it with the google analytics, they have no objections.

How is your experience?

By the way, Google Analytics and webalizer have different stats for visits etc. Depends on how they calculate the visits, browser javascript enabled or not etc., robots visits not counted in google analytics. These difference may not mean too much for the web site owner. as long as he/she will use google analytics data to compare with google analytics data etc.

But how about the web traffic bandwidth? will webalizer have the more accurate number of the traffic bandwidth than google analytics? Becasue webalzier has everything counted? And google analytics use a client side javascript to do the stats, it cannot calculate the bandwidth traffic, right?

So in addition to the google analytics, we will still need some kind software to do the stats on the web log for the bandwidth data etc if we need these data?

Thanks!

[dougal85]

I'd say Google Analytics would be fine. The only thing that google analytics doesn't record is users without javascript. So thus it can't tell how many people have JavaScript. The reason for this is its JavaScript based, so turn that off and the stats don't work.

[Horizon88]

Google analytics should be fine, seeing as most people would have javascript enabled. You could run both for a month or two to see the discrepancy between the two - if you have a large base of users only showing up in webalizer, maybe go with just webalizer, as a large part of your audience has javascript disabled.

My question, though, is why is this in the Linux/Unix Help forum?

[stolzyboy]

Moved to more appropriate forum.