Is There a Google Analytics Issue?

Does anyone know if Google Analytics has been having issues with accuracy lately? I use Google Analytics and Stat Counter on my blog, and they have generally been in line with each other. For some reason, Google Analytics has lately been off by over 10% lately. I use WordPress, so I know both analytics programs are installed site-wide.

Here’s a comparison:

January 2011 Google Analytics: 45,167 Visits
January 2011 Stat Counter: 45,227 Visits
Off by .13%

January 2012 Google Analytics: 54,627 Visits
January 2012 Stat Counter: 66,045 Visits
Off by 17.2%

I talked to a couple other people who have notice issues with Google Analytics reporting. Ordinarily, I would attribute it to Google not counting bots or something, but it’s strange since GA and SC numbers previously jived pretty well. February and March visitor numbers show a similar difference between GA and SC.

Is anyone else experiencing the same issue? What could be the problem?

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

8 COMMENTS

  1. You are using the new G analytics version. The old version is pretty much acurat. They are still having problems with the New version. Thats why both old and new are still up and running.

  2. I use something called SmarterStats. It anylizes your server’s log files so you know it’s accurate and it avoids sharing your data with third parties. It is software, not a plugin. Awesome reports with 3D graphs and all the bells and whistles. I run on IIS, not sure if it works on apache but I’m sure there is something that does.

    Also, you always refer to StatCounter as the one that is off by a percentage. Perhaps StatCounter is the more accurate one. Either way the true answer lies in your server logs.

  3. “Also, you always refer to StatCounter as the one that is off by a percentage. Perhaps StatCounter is the more accurate one. Either way the true answer lies in your server logs.”

    @ Jp

    I’ve always just assumed Google is more accurate.

  4. I wouldn’t assume. Better to know. Stats are important. You’ve got enough serious sites you should be using something better anyway. All this stuff works on JavaScript which ain’t awesome but generally good enough. You know in many browsers if you have a JavaScript error on your page (which isn’t all that uncommon) then the browser stops processing all JavaScript beyond the error? Most people never even realize that the error occurred because it just shows as a little yellow warning icon in the bottom corner of the status bar and makes no sound. JavaScript errors happen even on perfectly well coded sites with no coding errors. It’s just a little buggy and definitely not bulletproof. If you have few visitors this won’t account for much, but if you have many visitors and a diverse browser and geographic audience then this may contribute to a meaningful amount of missing stats.

  5. @ Elliot

    You may or may not know, but we own CelebGossip.com and it’s a heavily trafficked site and we have noticed that since Google rolled out the new update to GA the reporting does one of the two things.And I mention the site, because we only notice it on sites that have a large amount of traffic.

    1. The stats don’t total out correctly until mid afternoon. So it might say we had 55,000 visitors the day before at like 9:30 AM ET. But if I check it around 5:00 in the afternoon the same day it could be 100,000. Wild swings. All data points as well.

    2. GA won’t reveal all of your keywords that are driving traffic. This is something they’ve discussed.

    The real time stats are pretty cool. Especially when you have a massive news day. I got to see live tracking for a couple stories we ranked well for and it’s cool to see 500 concurrent users reading a story all at once.

    There are other stats solutions out there that are good if you continue to have issues. We haven’t switched yet just because of the fact that it’s not a real concern for us. If I have to wait until 5:00 the following day to get final numbers it’s fine for now.

    Anyway that’s my $0.02

  6. It might be that people are actively blocking Google Analytics. Personally, I use Adblock Plus 2.0.3 to specifically block http://www.google-analytics.com. So far, I have 4674 hits in Adblock and it did increase by 1 when I went to your page. Perhaps end-users are becoming savvy to Google’s alleged snooping and are blocking them in various ways. Adblock only works in FireFox so I will probably also add a rule to Norton Firewall, then blocking will become systemwide regardless of which browser I use..

    I do what little I can to protect my privacy from The Establishment such as use an encrypted proxy server from time to time and other simple measures. I have never used Google’s GMail. The last time I logged in to my Google account was at least 2 years ago.

    That’s my 2¢

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