Why are Google Webmaster Tools, GA, and Awstats all different on traffic?

[denvercardonations]

The differences are drastic between every stats tool I have tried. I have actually found Google Webmaster tools to be very off on so many things. It shows 200 pages of mine indexed, Google the search engine shows a totally different number. The same with discrepancies in data for analytic software. Why would they be so different, especially Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools?

 

[Nytshade]

Because they're just tools or piece of software, they're not perfect. These tools are only suppose to serve as a guideline for you. The fact that they're different shows that each has it's strength and weakness.

For instance, google webmaster tools is designed to track your website's performance in the SERPs and report error messages so it won't show social media traffic, bing traffic, yahoo, forums etc. So obviously it will be way off. The tool is not designed to track web traffic, you're using it for the wrong reasons.

So each tool is designed for a specific job. Hope that answers your question

 

[denvercardonations]

denvercardonations

ah you hit the nail on the head, that was exactly what I was using GWT for, overall search traffic. I think I found Awstats to be the most accurate for me, even if I don't understand some of the traffic teferring URLs, it guves pretty broad results. Thank you again.

 

[R44]

I know that, in the case of AWStats, it scours the logs on the server - so it will show everything, regardless of whether it's a bot or not.