We’re all about free web analytics, that’s why we started our web analytics study (and don’t worry our monthly report is coming). Nevertheless, we have come across a situation which we wanted to report to our readers ASAP. Our current article about our custom Google Toolbar button for Bing.com is generating a lot of referrals from Bing.com and Google. At least that is what StatCounter is telling us in their search engine referral report. Currently 75 % of searchers came from Google and 23.4 %  came from Bing.com– at least in  the last couple of hours.

Then we got a huge surprise when we looked at our Google Analytics stats tonight. This is the “Search Engine War” graph for June 3rd:

Not a mention about Bing.com in this graph.At first I thought Google was completely ignoring Bing.com, but instead they are listing them in the “referring sites” section.

As you can see, according to Google Analytics, we are getting 68% of our referrals from Bing.com….Wow!  a lot more than what we know from our server logs or StatCounter.

So what’s our take?  This is a good reminder that you should consider, in addition to Google Analytics, other free web analytics packages. We hope when our web analytics study is completed, it can help you with this task. In the meantime, we suggest statcounter.com to be a safe second choice.

*** Update***
We found a hack to fix this: How to add Bing into Google Analytics. Hopefully Google will make a change shortly.