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WordPress Stats twice as good as Google Analytics?
Wonder whether you’ve noticed this also if you’ve installed the WordPress.com Stats plugin and if you’ve got an Google Analytics account: their numbers are not the same!
But the difference is almost all the time 100%: WordPress statistics are twice the amount of Google Analytics for the same period.
I was very amused to see the double amount of ‘success’…
No, I can’t believe the ‘almighty’ Google is not as accurate as WordPress Stats. So I thought WordPress.com Stats screwed up. And this post titled How accurate is WordPress.com Stats (vs. Google Analytics)? seemed to prove my theory.
And although my confidence in Automattic and their work is huge, I was convinced they screwed up this time…until I read this sentence in the same topic: “I’m surprised we haven’t gotten more discussion on this matter”.
Having a huge (tech savy) userbase this error of WordPress should have being the talk of the blogosphere a long time ago. So after having investigated further, the answer was embarrassing simple:
WordPress Stats shows the views and Google Analytics show the visits.
So they are both good after all: WordPress Stats for the superficial overview and Google Analytics for the deep analysis. I suggest you get both of them.
Update:
Like ‘dani’ states in the comments Google Analytics shows also the pageviews next to the visitors and a lot of other data.
I think that you’re wrong.
GA allows you to see VISITS not only VIEWS, but this stats are different in all case.
So you’re theory are not reasonable.
I run WordPress Stats on my personal site and I feel I’m missing some things. When I launch my new design here in the coming days, I’m going to add the Google Analytics plugin to see how things compare. I noticed before that WordPress Stats shows views not visits, so I am missing how many people actually come to my site, not just how many pages they view.
Dani, thanks for your clarification.
I’ve updated the post with your comment, which was actually clear to me.
However the discussion, also at http://wordpress.org/support/topic/153553” rel=”nofollow”>How accurate is WordPress.com Stats (vs. Google Analytics)?, was about the initially grafx screen.
Hope it’s clear to them also, now…!
I love GA. One HUGE gap though is the amount of visits, hits, etc, of the individual files on the system.. For example, I have a video that 5 other sites are streaming from my server. None of those hits show up in either GA or WordPress. They only show if they went to the page and not just the file. ALWAYS run server side stats on your logs for the REAL DEAL!
Mookie
There’s also another factor that might cause different numbers between WordPress.com and Google Analytics stats when comparing the same metric (pageviews), and that’s caused by the way that each system gathers information: Google Analytics gets information by calling a javascript file, while WordPress.com stats analyze traffic information based on the requests of an image file.
Even when javascript is enabled by default by most (if not all) modern browsers, there are a few agents that won’t process this (and so, will pass unobserved by Google Analytics), such as users with javascript off or blocking javascript, old text-only browsers, search engines crawlers (Googlebot and others) and spam bots; all of which will be recorded as visits or views by WordPress.com stats since practically all of them process images or at least generate a request for them, thus marking a hit in the stats.
I am curious about this issue also, given that I am using WordPress stats on m newly constructed website and have been getting curious and unsatisfactory results.
It has already been documented here and elsewhere that Stats and GA provide measurements of entirely different things. As i understand it GA tracks the number of individuals viewers who access your site, while Stats tracks the number of times each viewer clicks on a page or even refreshes it.
In my case, I am running the WP theme Atahualpa, which has a header image that rotates to a new photo each time the the main page (or any sub page) is refreshed. Because the photos that rotate through are good and my viewers want to see them all, one viewer my refresh the page or repeatedly click the header photo any number of times. Given that the order of the rotating photos is random and not linear, a viewer could potentially have to click through 100 times to view all 25 or so photos. And as i understand it, Stats will measure this in its graphing as 100 views, rather simply keeping track of the fact that one person visited and refreshed the main page 100 times. This leads to a gross distortion of data if what one wants to track is their total number of viewers. My site has only been up for 4 or 5 days, but for example two days ago Stats recorded 143 views when i am pretty certain only 5-10 people visited the site.
So…does anyone know if GA will provide a more accurate measure of VIEWERS, rather than views?
Thanks! The site in question is http://www.zeyaschindler.com, if anyone wants a visual example.
GA records both viewers and page views, but even so you’ll likely get two different results with GA and WordPress Stats… what you should ultimately be looking at is the trends rather than brute numbers
Update:
In addition to Stats i have now installed Wassup.
While i still cant speak for GA, i must say that i am amazed by what Wassup offers. Not only are views recorded as separate from visits (as discussed in my previous post), but specific visitors can actually be tracked via an internal googlemap all the way down to a streetview of the address from which they are accessing your site. Its totally awesome, and totally creepy. Big brother is alive and well, and hes watching over my website…
Thank you for the clarification!
[...] Note: When considering traffic stats, remember that WordPress Stats shows the views and Google Analytics show the visits (see the Aytemir post, WordPress Stats twice as good as Google Analytics?). [...]
I have a similar problem with Statpress. Its showing 100% more traffic than Google Analytics.
When you say:
[quote]WordPress Stats shows the views and Google Analytics show the visits.[/quote]
You are incorrect! Statpress shows the visits and page views as does Google Analytics. So the mystery continues!
Actually – I have found that my WordPress stats are more than twice my Google Analytics numbers. The reason is, I believe, that WordPress counts Google image searches even when they don’t come to the page, while Google Analytics doesn’t count those. Google Analytics shows a variety of pages being visited as well, but WordPress stats shows a limited amount of pages being viewed – they are WAY OFF each other.
My theory was that everytime Google Image Search accesses your site to make a thumbnail image, WordPress stats records that as a page view, while Google Analytics does not. Does anyone know if this could or would be true??
Sorry for posting so late in the thread.