I don't completely trust google analytics. Not only do they have a vested interest in making themselves look good and squashing competition from other analytics providers, some of their stats are questionable. Here are three months of comparitive stats for one website I'm monitoring using both GA and Hitslink.

8892 - Jan-08 - Page Views Google Analytics
5696 - Jan-08 - Page Views Hitslink

7422 - Dec-07 - Page Views Google Analytics
5313 - Dec-07 - Page Views Hitslink

11025 - Nov-07 - Page Views Google Analytics
7884 - Nov-07 - Page Views Hitslink


2914 - Jan-08 - Unique Visitors Google Analytics
3070 - Jan-08 - Unique Visitors Hitslink

2738 - Dec-07 - Unique Visitors Google Analytics
2907 - Dec-07 - Unique Visitors Hitslink

3455 - Nov-07 - Unique Visitors Google Analytics
3705 - Nov-07 - Unique Visitors Hitslink

So GA seems to be over-reporting page views and under reporting unique visitors. I can't remember if I blocked my IP on GA so it wouldn't register my own visits as traffic, but I do remember that it was much convoluted to block the IP in GA than in Hitslink.

Additionally, and perhaps even more important ... GA reports some really strange garbage as keywords used to find the site; stuff that is completely irrelevant to the website being monitored. And when I dig into the keywords on GA to find their source and then go to that source to look up the keywords, my site is nowhere to be found. While I know that the SERPs for keywords are dynamic, the GA results are consistently too preposterous to trust it.

But as long as GA is free, I'll keep the experiment going, for a while at least. But at some point, I'll cut it off so that big brother is not watching.

And overall, I've compared a number of tracking & analytics applications and I still believe that Hitslink is one of the easiest to use with some of the best reporting. It really blows away GA in this respect.