I am measuring a few sites and use both webmaster tools and analytics to track various aspects. One of the aspects I try to measure and track is performance.
I am getting a much more reliable measurements in analytics, mostly thanks to this article. However, I am also curious about the stats that appear on the webmaster tools site performance
section.
One thing I noticed is that the numbers don't exactly match. The second thing is that Webmaster Tools updates much less frequently. That's probably to be expected, but most of the sites I have will show latest information from a couple of days ago, but one particular site still displays data as updated on Apr 12, 2012
(today is May 05, 2012). In terms of accesses, it's not a particularly small site compared to others. So it's unlikely the slow updates are because it has too little or no traffic.
My questions, in case someone knows:
- How come one website only shows performance stats from nearly a month ago and doesn't get updated?
- What is the difference in measurements (method, accuracy, source of data etc) between analytics and webmaster tools?
- Is there any 'best-practice' to make sure google (and me) get the most reliable measurements?
UPDATE: To clarify, I am not asking what's the difference between webmaster tools and analytics, what are the best tools to test my site performance, or what's the best practice for SEO in general. I am quite aware of those. I am just wondering about the particular issues I experienced above and the specific aspects affecting performance measurements and update frequency in those tools.