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.

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!

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…

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.

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.

Mookie

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…!