Google Analytics, does it work?

Is google analytics tracking everything?

[hosst]

I would like to know some answers about google anayltics, my site seems to have a decline of about 99% traffic in the last 2 weeks, the site www.mypreviews.com has been optimized, advertised in many search engines and even promoted offline and I can assure you that the tracking code is placed in all pages, however google analytics indicates that the visitors have gone from an average of 200 a day to about 5, I was getting very depressed to know that the moon gets more human visitors than my site but I checked the log files and I found that there are still many more than what google says I get, I get at least 40 or 50 a day, a lot less but no the way analytics describes in the reports, why is this happening, why there is a big different in uniques count between my logs and anaylitics? Is google losing track? is there a trick to make me buy more traffic feeling that I need more visitors? this is very weird, what do you think, please check out my site, perhaps there is something else wrong with it, I really appreciate your help, thank you, Jenny

[cuiyj]

Please put google analytic tracking code on the top of your page, not bottom. In my experience, there will be 30% difference.

Maybe your need a log analyzer. It is more accurate than google analytic in most time. I use google analytic and log analyzer both.

[pizzaguy]

I second on that, some visitors will leave the page before waiting for whole page to load. So, your visitors might be leaving your pages before the code loads if it is at the bottom of your pages.

[potentialgeek]

Please put google analytic tracking code on the top of your page, not bottom. In my experience, there will be 30% difference.

Why does Google say put it at the bottom? I understand the load-time issue, but you think Google doesn't know it, too? If the stats difference is 30%, isn't that big enough for Google to say put it at the top?

Is there any disadvantage of putting the code at the top?

p/g

[vanguard2000]

Google says that you should put it at the bottom so that your pages load up faster. You should put as much of your JS code to the bottom as possible so your pages load up faster. You see, when browser sees JS file, it tries to load it up and locks up the display of your page. So, you should ALWAYS put it to the bottom.

As for differences in reporting when it's at the top, seriously, why do you care? The people that came and left before the file was loaded were not your customers anyway so why would you wanna count them at the expense of having your pages load up slower?! Makes no sense whatsoever.

[cgrantski]

It's slightly possible that GA tags aren't getting activated because they're at the bottom of the page, but unless your page is very large and complicated, very inefficiently coded, your server's bandwidth is very cramped, or your visitors overwhelmingly use dialup, then this cannot possibly account for the difference you are seeing.

Let's assume the GA tag is capturing everything as designed.

You say your log files show a lot more traffic than GA does. Then think about what kinds of visitors show in logs and not in tagged-page tracking. The answer usually is spiders and bots, plus visits consisting entirely of files that cannot be tagged, i.e. pdfs, images, docs, Flash, wavs, streaming media, certain kinds of refreshes, and so forth.

So, is this the situation? Do a lot of your visits consist just of a pdf? Are the visits in your logs mainly spiders and bots? Etc.