There is a constant battle in the web analytics world about tools. Some are free, others are expensive. Some will argue that one particular product is very simple while alternatives are too complicated. Another point of debate is the accuracy of one tool vs. another, and understanding why the discrepancy exists. It's really no different than any other industry. I remember the exact same debate as a developer arguing over which IDE was the best for writing code.
Surprisingly, the numbers are almost identical. This might be a side effect of such a small sample size (I'm not delusional about the popularity of my little blog). When we run this test again in 6 months, would we expect a bigger difference? Are there other metrics that would be worth comparing?
| Analytics Tool | Page Views | Visits | Unique Visitors | Bounce Rate |
| Omniture SiteCatalyst | 62 | 30 | 11 | 50% |
| Google Analytics | 61 | 30 | 10 | 53% |
A few other thoughts:
- Geo Segmentation showed the exact same countries represented.
- Average Time Spent on Site was much higher in SiteCatalyst
- Both show one visit from an iPhone
- The Visitor Loyalty/Visit Number Report was pretty similar in both
So, let's try this again in a few months and see what differences start to emerge.
I find it interesting that Omniture is reporting one more Unique Visitor than GA. Especially because GA is higher in the code than Omniture. Any ideas why this would happen? I can see where a page view wouldn't be counted but an entire visitor is interesting.
ReplyDeleteI'm interested to see how latency plays into this. I looked at the same reports tonight and saw quite a discrepancy, but then looked a little deeper to see that GA hadn't reported today yet.
ReplyDeleteI'm also curious to see if GA can track visitors across multiple browsers on a Google owned product like Blogspot.com, when the user is logged in on the multiple browsers.
I'll have to figure out a good way to test it.