I’ve been monitoring visits to both my own blog and the For Immediate Release blog for nearly a year using StatCounter, a terrific free service that provides me with a wide range of information it pulls from my sites by virtue of setting up an account and inserting a small bit of code onto the pages I want tracked. That’s the same way the new Google Analytics works, although the Google offering dishes up only a fraction of the information StatCounter does and the accuracy of the information it does provide is questionable. Let’s look at one day on this blog, Wednesday, November 16. According to StatCounter, I had 381 page loads. Of these, 223 represented new visitors and 63 were returning visitors.

Google Analytics, on the other hand, shows 46 new visitors and 26 returning visitors.

Both services are tracking the same page, which makes you wonder how Google could get it so wrong. Even when Google gets closer StatCounter’s results, it’s still off. For yesterday, StatCounter showed 294 new visitors and 192 returnees; Google tallied 286 and 186. The wildly varying results lead me to stick with StatCounter, which I was going to do anyway, given the variety of ways StatCounter lets me slice and dice the data (popular pages, entry pages, exit pages, came from, keyword analysis, recent keyword activity, visitor paths, visitor lengths, recent pageload activity, recent visitor activity, county/state/city/zip, and a bunch of others—and this is all with the free service!).

Still, Google—the Wal*Mart of online brands—has the juice to swamp StatCounter despite a shoddy and less feature-rich service. Too bad.