Over the years, it has been one of the most asked questions by bloggers getting started.
Which of these analytics should they rely on, Akismet Site Stats or Google Analytics?
There is a difference in the visitor reports provided by Akismet Site Stats and Google Analytics.
Akismet Site Stats
Akismet is a WordPress Plugin developed by WordPress.Org. It offers additional features you can enable after you have activated the plugin. One of the features is site stats.
Pros of having Site Stats in WordPress comparison
It is useful because it lets you look at the visitor Count on your website within your WordPress dashboard.
When you log into your WordPress blog, the numbers can motivate you to write more content. It works well when you are getting started, but it is also so useful for advanced bloggers to look at how gradual the growth of the Year website is.
Cons of having Site Stats in WordPress
While it is helpful to know the visitor Count on a day-to-day basis, sites that do not offer additional data apart from telling you how many people are coming from search engines and the reference websites that are sending traffic to your website.
And sometimes you would want to know more about the visitor activity on your website. Again, it is where Google Analytics can come in handy.
Also, if you are already using many plugins, it might not be good to have the site stats feature enabled in the Akismet plugin, as the more features you add to your blog, the more time it will take to load.
And if you are in a space where a 1-second delay means putting off a certain percentage of visitors, you are looking at some serious revenue loss.
My recommendation would be to test the speed of your side, both before and after enabling the feature, to see if it is impacting the loading speed of your site or not.
Google Analytics
For most bloggers and Publishers, Google Analytics is enough to track user activity on their websites.
In the last few years, Google Analytics has grown to offer analytic solutions for app developers and integrate Google Analytics into their apps.
Pros of using Google Analytics
The amount of data it offers is quite extensive. If you learn to use Google Analytics properly, you will grow your online business by making content strategy for your website, changing the layout, putting your best content forward.
And like I mentioned about site stats, which can impact the loading speed of your website. It is not the case with Google Analytics since it is a third-party analytics service, which does not strain your website servers.
Cons of using Google Analytics
Apart from the inconvenience of logging into an additional dashboard to check out your site stats, there aren’t any serious cons to using Google Analytics.
I can think of a con when many robots visit your website, and Google Analytics considers them visitors, which greatly misreports the visitor data.
But you can tackle it if you know how to use Google Analytics properly.
Since Google Analytics is free to use and offers a ton of data, you highly recommend that you use it for your blog.
So you can keep it this way, use Google Analytics as your primary source for visitor data, and use the equipment. Then, I start to take a quick look into how your website is doing in terms of visitor count.
