For some reason a lot of administrators confuse analytical and statistical software. In reality the two chunks of software do have some similarities, but they are also very different. Here is a quick comparison of them.
Statistical Software
Statistical software simply measures how many hits and unique visitors you have, which pages were hit the most, how many 404 errors occurred, etc. Statistical software is generally pretty accurate, although the web server’s raw access logs are much more accurate.
The statistics can also tell you if your site got more hits this week than last week, how many returning visitors you have, etc.
Analytical Software
Analytical software may also measure website statistics, but these packages were made to take a look at individual visitors, visitor patterns, etc. The number of unique visitors reported by analytical software tends to be less than with statistical software, because of the way visitors are measured.
Analytical software is very useful for advertisement campaigns, because you can look at how the user entered, which keywords are the most popular, how many visitors are from the U.S., etc.
Basically you can think of statistics as being a log of the visitors as a whole, and analytics as a measure the individual visitor.
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