StatCounter vs Google Analytics – Which is best?
We have been using both StatCounter as well as Google Analytics for about the past 10 years, and we have a few things we like about each. For those of you who need solid accuracy, we strongly recommend to use Google Analytics over StatCounter.
StatCounter
One of my favorite features of StatCounter is that it's real time analytics reporting. You can simply log in, and hit refresh to see what new traffic you are getting. i think for real time there is nothing better. Especially on high traffic sites, this is crucial to be able to tell what changes to your site have what effect on your traffic.
The problem with StatCounter though is overall the numbers are over inflated. We have a site that receives almost no traffic, and we log in one day to find the site had 13 visitors and 13 page views. We look at the traffic, and find that all 13 visitors came from actually one visitor browsing the site. There was no valid reason for StatCounter to could each page view as a visit also. The service also has a hard time separating visitors that use AOL or other such services. These things cause StatCounter to be inaccurate.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics might not give us real time reporting, but that's ok. The hourly filter is delayed about 1-3 hours and the daily is of course, daily. The good thing about this is the information is more comprehensive, and it appears to be much more accurate in it's traffic reporting.
So overall, what we would recommend would be to use Google Analytics on your site, but also include StatCounter and use that for when you need realtime reports.