Managing and leveraging your analytics system for your webpages and website is vitally important. We’ve talked about that a number of times on some of our other blogs (ChurchCrunch mostly) and most people wouldn’t argue with that.

But finding the right system and software to use can be tricky, not to mention using (and understanding) 3rd party traffic calculators (Quantcast, Alexa, Compete, etc).

In fact, it’s been proven time and time again that these third party services aren’t very accurate. A good read from a very trusted source shows that the proof is in the pudding. Thanks Reddit.

In fact, as a result, we’ve decided to pull Quantcast as an analytics provider since we’ve reviewed, month-over-month, the inaccuracies. It’s pretty sad, even when it sits right in our own sites!

Not to mention one of the saddest things is that their tracking code doesn’t even validate in very simple W3C Markup Validation:

Sheesh. I have enough errors on my site already. I don’t need any more!

So, Now What?

So, what does one do to make sure that accurate statistics are being pulled?

Well, we’re definitely going to keep the two biggies: Google Analytics and grepping our own server logs for accurate information.

But it would be nice to have another service to round it out and compare with Google, right?

Hmm…

Scratch Your Own Itch!

Since we’re fans of some (not all) of what the 37signals guys do (and we’ve been doing this one for awhile…) we’re going to scratch our own itch.

We’re going to “roll our own” and develop one that will serve our own business needs, pulling in the right data, expressing it beautifully, and perhaps opening it up to the community for their use.

You can read the last two sentences as a sneak peek and secret announce of a new analytics application that the 8BIT Team is building… or you could read it as:

John’s doing something funky and weird again. Doesn’t he like to sleep?

… Probably the latter is more accurate.

In any case, if you’re interested in learning more or getting on our Top Secret Newsletter for updates and news on our release, feel free to subscribe.

Or, you can follow us on Twitter: @ChurchAnalytics

Something awesome is brewing…