how accurate does "google analytics" track your traffic?

[marley17]

tittle explain it well .. also im assuming that all of us had excluded our IP's that generates hits and etc.

Can you name what free softwares that you use that is good/better or the same as google analytics does?

[Danielx386]

Me, I rather use the access log files that the server creates, since no one can hide from that

[masshuu]

i would say its probably fairly accurate, although, it requires browsers with javascript and iframes.
looking around real quick turned up
http://www.phpmyvisites.us/
http://www.openwebanalytics.com/

[ah-blabla]

There's also Piwik, which is essentially a free software equivalent to Google Analytics, which shares the same disadvantages in that anyone with javascript turned off (e.g. me) isn't detected (although it could potentially be modified to allow tracking of those without javascript), whereas the software supermatthew mentioned works through php (fully serverside), meaning everyone is logged, even bots, similarly to the server logs, only that the logs aren't very pretty.

[priyaa161]

I trust Google and all its co websites so I would not hesitate to say that it will be accurate but I'd never got chance to experience it because I've never made any website and the one I was working is down from a week or two because of all this migrations going on here.
There is one more counter I've seen on some of the websites.

www.statcounter.com

[techairlines]

Google Analytics is fairly accurate and I use it on just about all websites/blogs I own.

I just wish there was an easy way to one click set an exclude cookie like Statcounter does. I set the cookie through a javascript: command, except I have no idea if it actually worked or not. When I first used it in August, it clearly didn't work, but now it seems to work.

Statcounter.com is pretty accurate also, except it sets third party tracking cookies rather than first party cookies like Google does. Statcounter can also track IP addresses, unlike Google.

[goldblue]

Try this : http://www.addfreestat.com/

[xav0989]

I, for my public websites, use a custom/framework-integrated logging feature that logs each IP visit, the page, time, etc. If I need to analyze my traffic, i can easily remove, using perl, entries from known bots, i.e. googlebot, and also count how many unique IP hit per day. For the "hidden" more file-storage part of my website, I don't use any traffic logger, as I don't send many people to that section, and use it most to send file, store files or test html and such.