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posted in Google Analytics v puresilva Stats
Our own website template comes with its own website visitor metrics, but it does allow site owners to easily plug-in Google Analytics and Site Meter stats packages. This article is a comparison between puresilva's own stats facilities against Google Analytics (GA):-puresilva Stats
Positives:- Real-time stats, up to the second. You can see what products are being viewed currently (via AJAX live updating), as well as general visitor stats being live. This is the best way to give you a "feel" for your audience - when and where they visit from, how they browse your site, right now.
- Exact URL referrals so you know from which exact page they found your site from. This combined with realtime recording, and you can see instantly where the sudden spike in traffic is coming from (for example) - such as a specific blog entry on another site that links to you. GA only gives the domain name of referrers, and GA data is only as fresh as 24 hours ago.
- Convenient - you get all your stats where you manage your website
- Targeted stats specific to the template - view the most popular categories and products on your site for example
- Not as feature-rich as GA (how could it be?!)
- No benchmark comparison between your site and other sites in your field
Google Analytics
Positives- Has an amazing amount of features that allow you to get a very clear picture of your website visitors - geographic location, domain referral, how long they stay on your website, the most popular pages etc
- Benchmarking - see how your stats compare to other websites in your field
- Goal/conversion metrics - define a goal, and see how many of these occur on your site
- Data comes in 24 hours later. You see things as they happened, not as they happen
- No specific URL referral (only domain name referral) - so if you get referrals from Digg.com (for example), you won't know the specific page on Digg.com without manually searching the site yourself.
- It's a generic stats package, so you won't have stats tailored to fit your site, such as category / product popularity stats
Conclusion
This looks like an either/or kind of comparison, but many puresilva website owners run GA in conjunction with the native stats facilities on their sites to get the best of both worlds.Share this article:
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