What Is The Deal With Website Stats?

 Your webstats are very important for you to understand if you ever want to monetize your blog or website by selling your ad space. I'm no expert on this topic and still trying to learn what is what and which stats are the most important for you to understand. I do know that page views and unique visitors are two that I keep seeing mentioned by other bloggers. Your stats will determine how much money you should charge potential advertisers who want to reach your audience.

What is the deal with Awstats and it's statistical reporting? Awstats is similar to Google Analytics, but has a lot less features in terms of reporting depth. It came with Cpanel because my other site is a self hosted Wordpress.org blog. My problem is that it shows my site as having 35,848 page views with 1,528 unique visitors so far in the month of March, but Google Analytics has far different numbers. GA is reporting 886 page views with 351 being unique visitors. So which service is accurate?

Month	Unique visitors	Number of visits	Pages	Hits	Bandwidth
Jan 2011	942	5620	19870	49815	587.67 MB
Feb 2011	1175	6207	23930	70885	867.68 MB
Mar 2011	1528	7013	35848	98569	959.78 MB

Google Analytics Listed Below
 


As you can see from the numbers above that something just isn't right!

Google Needs To Simplify Adsense And Analytics

I love all the great stuff that Google allows us to use, but I wish they would simplify the use of Adsense and Analytics for people like me! I'm using both or let me say trying to use both! I have been going crazy trying to get  the Analytics configured the right way with not much success up to this point. I  will keep on plugging away until I get it right or go completely nuts, whichever comes first! I want to install the analytics on a self hosted wordpress site and have not found a plugin that I can use. If you know of a way please let me know because any help will be greatly appreciated!