Google Analytics: The Numbers Are Missing
Google Analytics is a great tool. I use it for several sites. The in-depth information provided by this world-class service is priceless. Wonderful graphs, deep information mining and ease of use make it a wonderful platform for analytics and statistics for web sites.
However, because Analytics uses JavaScript, there’s a world of missed opportunity. For the past year, I took the numbers provided by Analytics and StatCounter literally. I assumed that my site only received 300-600 pageviews a day — excluding several stories which brought much traffic and attention to my site.
Well, I’ve been living a lie. Both Google Analytics and StatCounter weren’t showing me the entire picture. So, last month, I started paying more attention to my web server’s log and installed several stat tools on WordPress. I was blown away.
On a typical day, I receive thousands of pageviews. Just this past Friday, almost 4,000 unique readers (representing more than 12,000 pageviews) visited my site to read articles about Erin Burnett alone. Suffice to say, I was overjoyed by the new numbers, although I suspected that my site was doing much better than Google and other JavaScript tools were showing.
For the month of June, ronaldlewis.com saw more than 100,000 pageviews. Google, nor StatCounter, are showing numbers anywhere near this amount.
So, here’s a word of advice: Don’t take the numbers provided by Google and StatCounter literally. You are cheating yourself of the real, hardcore numbers. However, I would recommend that bloggers and web site owners continue to use these JavaScript based tools for analytics purposes. While they may not tell the whole story, they are still good to keep around.
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i have noticed this in my own record keeping, but have determined that those other statistics are generally people with cookies disabled. if a user can not store a session variable then every pageview is counted as a session with one page view, which can really add up fast, even with the small amount of people with cookies disabled. search engine robots also have cookies disabled. i have found if i delete all session records with no referral information and only one pageview, that it gets my own records pretty close to what google shows, so i believe this is what accounts for the difference, in my case at least.