Yes there are many different tools available to make your life much easier when analyzing your stats. Some are better than others and of course there are paid and free programs as well. You just need to find and use what you are comfortable with.

I can tell you that you are not alone there it is like inviting big brother into your home by using them but as you have said it can be very helpful. For me however I just sick to using my stats in the cpanel of my hosting account and if I really need to know something I then set up goals in Google Analytics.

You are correct you need to use the stat counters that are in the cpanel of your hosting company, this will give you a much more accurate account of what is happening with your website visitors. Google analytic is okay for tracking such things a promotions that you are conducting or split testing on pages.

I use it to track promotions only and even then as you have said only some of the traffic gets tracked due to Java issues. I have also on occassion used another service which is free called Statcounter.

It is amazing how many people don’t understand this and it is so easily done with the many free tools online such as Google analytics and the webmaster tools. And you even have an analytics function in Clickbank that you can use to see how many hops it is taking you to make a sale.