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Truth, bots could really be PITA. Still, with log analysis you can remove (at least some of) them, but with JS you can't add them. Same applies to non-page files.
Removing them from the logs sounds difficult. And adding them to JS-based stats doesn't sound very useful. I don't particularly care whether Google indexes my site at 10am or 11am so long as it gets indexed. And I certainly don't care about the comment spam botnets.
Of course the hour of bot's visit is not important, but it could be important to see if it comes every day or not. Not to mention hits to images and other files.
I'm an author of this article - thank you all for commenting. I don't have an intention to start a flame war - both methods have pros and cons, but in this "GA craziness" people tend to forget that log analysis even exists. Hence the article. :)
And yes, Dataland Software "sells" interactive web log analyzer, but I can't really see how's that important?
Full disclosure. It's the same reason that, say, foreign policy columns written by someone in the current administration will say "So-and-so is Deputy Director of Such-and-such."
Asking the provider of a service to show reasons why their product is 'better' is going to give you a fairly biased story, it is good to declare such bias up front.
Personally I found most of their 'reasons' to be fairly contrived.
I think it would be possible to come up with a much more balanced point of view than the one given in the article when comparing tag based analysis and log based analysis.
Both have their uses, some of the reasons given hold water but most of them are pretty thin.
You could make an equally unbalanced list of 10 reasons why tag based analysis is 'better'. The important thing to notice is that tag based analysis is very convenient and can give you a bunch of information that would be fairly hard for a log file based analyzer to provide.
Log file analysis has it's place though, especially when you need to dig in to locate a problem. That's when a log file analyzer is next to useless though, you are basically going to go hunting through the raw logs in order to find your evidence.
The article smacks of a business giving me reasons to buy their product in the light of free competition. (The other alternative to paid log analyzers besides tag based analysis is of course an foss implementation of such a log analyzer).
From the first paragraph of the article: "Depending on your preferences and type of the website, you might find some or all of these arguments applicable or not. In any case, everyone should be at least aware of differences in order to make a right decision."
That's substantially different from declaring up front what your biases are. No part of that sentence indicates to me that you stand to gain from convincing me your points are valid.
