Forum Moderators: DixonJones
GA pageviews are very different from how our server sees our pageloads. Can someone please explain why GA looks at traffic differently from our server? I understand the notion behind uniques and sessions, etc, but total pages are completely different, aren't they?
Thanks,
Greg
This is probably the most common newbie question from people who have used the two different sources of data, server logs and javascript tags.
There are some detailed replies elsewhere in this forum going back several years. Part of the short version is that the javascript tagging method, for various reasons, contains virtually no hits by spiders or bots, as well as no downloads of untaggable files like pdfs.
This can be a huge difference, possibly as big as 50%.
On the other hand, the javscript method picks up backbutton clicks (i.e. cached views of pages) and server logs usually do not. The difference caused by this factor is a lot smaller than the spider/bot different, for most sites.
